I always thought I enjoyed remote work as an engineer/architect, I did it for 6 months by my own volition before coming back. I am extremely unhappy. I really miss being in the office with my coworkers and friends. I've struggled deeply with overwhelming sadness at the idea of not going back anytime soon. My work has suffered from a lack of dynamic interactions. I get lots of focus time, just like I did at the office, but working in the same building I live in has been brutal. Maybe I'm different than the average HN reader, but I'm a social butterfly and not going in to the office has been devastating to my mental health, my appetite, my motivation, and my overall interest in work. I exercise the same amount, I eat just as healthy (just less), but something is missing. If this field goes primarily remote, I will leave.
I have worked from home for the last couple of years. Prior to the Covid shutdown, I had generally enjoyed it. Once my children's school closed and my wife's work switched to work from home, my productivity has plummeted. I find it impossible to focus as every 10 minutes I have a young child running into my office, or have to listen to them yelling at each other (as all kids do). My wife has had a hard time adjusting and she is equally distracted by the kids and her frustration feeds mine. She is forced to be on conference calls for most of the day (I am actually surprised at how many there are, they are all calls with executive level people so she cant opt out. Almost all income producing departments have to pass through her team and they laid off her support staff) but is still expected to complete real work as well which she cant do now until the calls stop after 5. I have been able to get very little deep work done and find myself working until 2 / 3 am to accomplish the same work I used to do in a normal shift.
I feel very bad for my kids as all they want is to be able to play with their friends and do all the things they could before so I do my very best to not show them my frustration. Its a depressing situation all around but I am very grateful to actually still have a job while so many others have lost theirs. My kids ask me why I have to work so much all the time, as all they want to do is spend time with me.
I guess what I am trying to say is the current situation is not optimal.
My company (large-ish un-sexy software company you've never heard of) gave the software managers clear direction on this: "It's not realistic for people with school-aged children to be fully productive right now. Do not demand they take PTO or ask them to work at night. If they can only work five hours a day, that's what they can do."
I suspect it's unusual that my boss actually said that out loud, but I hope everyone is thinking it. This is a temporary situation none of us planned for, and it ought to be reasonable and expected to lower your standards until schools and childcare are around again.
Thanks for sharing. Three kids spanning elementary and middle; one is neurotypical, other two have different strengths and needs. My work space is a single car unconditioned garage, atop a stack of boxes. Yesterday I was inside between meetings for a total of 4 minutes between meetings and had reduced two of them to tears. Today I had to cut off my 1st grader, who was in middle of excitedly presenting me a LEGO she completed, because it was :59 after and I needed to get on a call. Granted, most days are a little more even, but it's hard to not feel like there's a choice between damaging relationships/reputation at work or damaging relationship with kids. They're of course not mutually exclusive, and kids are clear priority if it were.
Having work and home contexts now collapsed into single environment has had the surprising effect where each interaction with the family during my work day triggers the subconscious thought of whether I just made a tradeoff between work and home -- and if so, was it the right one. In isolation the amount of energy each thought takes is negligible, but add up each interaction throughout the day, and day after day, it's been incredibly draining.
I dunno, my thoughts change daily on this topic. But this is my venting of for whatever day it is. usually I type these replies and never submit, but cathartic, if nothing else, to vent and post this one today.
p.s. agree, while not optional, still incredibly grateful to still have a job.
I work from home and since about February my productivity nose-dived. It suffered before they closed the schools because of worry and constant news checking, etc. Then when the schools closed here in March I have been near useless. I have started to claw back some routines and some short spells of focused work lately but as the main carer for the kids, I have constant homeschooling, cooking, peace-making, MacGuyvering, Wikipediaing, Joe Wicksing to do for them. Closing my home office door last about on average 3 minutes, probably.
The other problem is the confusion of what day it is and that since I got not much work done during the weekdays I also work at the weekend, which before was a complete no-no. Over the long term, this lack of time off for them and me probably is not good.
Cut and paste. I have three kids and they span a broad range of ages. I feel lucky to have a dedicated home office with a door that closes, but that doesn’t stop the constant interruptions from my kids. I can only imagine the global destruction of productivity that is happening right under our noses.
Exact same boat here, we can't complain because we still have our jobs, we feel terrible because our kids are getting bored out of their minds and all they want is our attention, i don't know how long we can go on like this.
I haven't figured out how to be as productive as night as I would be in the morning, which used to be my best hours.
You simply can't WFH with young children at home and no full-time caretaker. My wife and I tried alternating 6-hour shifts of work and childcare, 6 days/week, and finally gave up and hired a nanny.
Your comment has converted me from a lurker to a first time poster. I'm in the exact same boat as you and just wanted to tell you to keep on plugging away and doing the best you can. Its all we can really do.
This is really interesting, and rings a lot of bells for myself as well. Are you in the US?
I think it is time for a lot of people for a relocation to somewhere with better-larger living arrangements, and better access to childcare (private or public).
And it also should give rise to gig economy around private tutors/babysitters/nannys - which is very useful, and actually could be fun for a lot of people.
Thanks for this comment, I'm empathetic and am in a similar boat. I'm curious if there are managers/companies out there that are expecting the same level of productivity from their staff during these times?
I for one expect lower productivity from my staff whether or not they have kids, and am adjusting delivery dates to account for this.
Other than having not worked from home for many years now (which I am very happy to do when it works out), your experience is highly relatable. For the kids, I'm sad and wish I could do something more for them. But work abounds.
> I really miss being in the office with my coworkers and friends.
Are you young, single, and live in an apartment? I have noticed a divide along those lines with WFH. As an older, married person, living in a house with a yard, I haven't worked in an office for any length of time for last 10 years.
None of my close friends are related to work. I like having lunch with my wife and going out back with the dogs when I need a break. I also have an actual office with a door in my house. The time I save commuting means there is more time to workout and cook healthy meals every day. And, if I really want to 'get out' the local coffee shop is 5 minutes away. The owner and her 2 employees are awesome along with great coffee and great internet.
Of course I may think differently if I was back in my 600 sqft apartment and single with few friends.
I think it is expected that we will see the full spectrum of reactions to this new work environment. Everything from :
- whether you are living single or with a significant other
- happily married or have your relationship just scraping by (As an aside, I read that China has seen a spike in divorces after their lockdown)
- have kids or no kids, have teenagers or toddlers
- have a comfortable home office or are working from your kitchen table and sitting on a dining chair
- are introverted or extroverted
- have great co-workers in a great workplace environment or if you dislike your office and/or co-workers
- if you have a long commute or live a relaxing 10 minute walk from the office
... the list goes on and on.
It is not surprising that you will have every variation of the above. But my guess is that for the majority of the people, once they setup a proper home office, the would likely find working from home to be somewhere in the "mildly positive" to "really positive" side of things. Even if some disagree with that, at the very least, I imagine that most would agree that they would like to have the _option_ to work from home whenever they choose.
Speaking as a young, single and lives in an apartment person. As an introvert I've often relied on being present among people to kind of substitute for my social life. With that not being present, it really puts focus on the presence or lack of social network. I'm actually grateful in a way that it has forced me to reach out to people in my network, that I otherwise wouldn't have..
Age of children is also factor. I suspect people enjoy the escape an office provides when they have toddlers. I really enjoy having lunch with my teenage kids everyday thanks to Covid. Working from home has been a blessing.
> I like having lunch with my wife and going out back with the dogs when I need a break. I also have an actual office with a door in my house. The time I save commuting means there is more time to workout and cook healthy meals every day.
My 200 sq ft. microstudio has been absolute torture these last few weeks. I thought I was being smart and saving money - I'd pay much more now to be sheltered anywhere else. A house with a yard would be amazing.
However, I do have friends outside of work. Obviously right now I'm rarely if ever seeing them, and certainly not all. Very occasionally we decide on a small coffee shop to go support at the same time and talk from a couple car spaces away for a few minutes just to engage in some kind of social behavior. It helps momentarily, but not consistently.
Going to work and making friends there, while not "IRL" friends, really helps work become a more fluid environment where you don't need to stress out all the time on structure. It gives breathing room. Some jokes lighten the mood. I personally feel like it's easier to discuss important topics when I have "friends" on my team or other teams who have a respect for my train of thought.
Also, while I do have a desk and monitor now, I work in the same room as my entertainment space (living room). So I'm literally in the same room all day. And no, I don't want to setup a workspace in my bedroom, that'd be even worse.
If I had a dedicated office room that'd be nice. If I had a more normal house where I had space to walk between areas like the kitchen, dining room/area, living room that would help.
This is a very American way of looking at things. In many countries singles live with their parents and families live in apartments and the country is not so vast and big so your social circle can go with you all the way from school just because they still live around. So the level of isolation and space can vary and not necessary depends on the parameters you have mentioned, however in the individual level it is pretty correct, the level of isolation and convenience will dictate how happy a remote worker is. Personally I have found that a mix of 2 days at the office and 3 at home works the best for me.
The current situation has unfortunately eliminated some options like co-working spaces that might otherwise alleviate this issue for you.
I'm optimistic about a "work wherever works for you" future. That might mean the company's office, or your home office, or your living room couch, or a coworking space, or a beach, or your parents' house, or a friend's place. It might mean all of those at different times. The current situation has made it clear that remote work is pretty viable, but it's destroyed the element of choice that is so important to mental health for many people.
I think it's good for you to realize this is how you feel.
I, on the other hand, get a lot more focus time here, at home, than in the office. Every little 'ding' sound, every little 'hey, when did you get home last night' conversation, every time someone turns on or off the lights, all of that and much more just rips me out of my concentration.
I've been able to focus _a lot_ more from home. It's good for me to realize this as well.
Feel free to stay in the office when you're finally able to, and I'll work towards staying at home, if I'm able to. That way, we're both happy.
My social life does not intersect much with my work life.
Do you perhaps live alone in a small apartment? I can see how working from home could be tough on a situation like that.
I live with my family, in a house, with a garden, and I absolute abhor the idea of resuming a daily commute. I hate our office, and I love my home.
I live in a small apartment with my dog. I don't get out enough, it does make you depressed after a while. Luckily I have a some friends that work from home in the area. We take turns going to each other's house for the work day. Gives you a change of scenery while you work, and someone to interact with while working. Although a lot of it is sitting in silence in the same room, just having another human around can boost your mood. At least for me this does wonders.
I think I overall enjoy WFH, that said, my quality of life would be greatly improved if I lived in a larger home rather than my one bedroom apartment.
I've seen some people predict that a surge in home buying may follow the pandemic because people will realize how much better off they would have been in a larger space.
I will go ahead and move into a 2 bedroom in the next few months to allow me to have a more private office space.
My office is a wework so it's literally like 1000 times better than my shitty apartment. I just have to worry about so much less at the office. Free barista coffee, washing up and cleaning done for you so you're not messing up your workspace. I miss it a lot.
I have the same feelings and I think a part of it comes from the fact that it's not exactly possible to meet with people after work (not counting Zoom/Skype/Whatsapp with friends). It's not the remote working that is depriving us of our joy of socializing - it's having to stay home after.
Absolutely. My work has been better than ever due to not being in the office and not having to do a horrible commute (min. 45 mins each way, usually more).
The evenings are pretty dull, though - no jam sessions or martial arts classes can run, so my hobbies are on hold.
I fully agree with you. Although office interactions play a big part in socialization, I think most of the uneasiness I feel right now is due to the fact that I can't even socialize outside of work, or with non-coworkers. Not caused by remote work per se.
You are not alone. We often under estimate the value of workplace bonding. Planning a dinner for the team when we have been through a tough development cycle for a couple months for instance is incredibly rewarding. It vastly improves the quality of collaboration and the way people engage with each other. Helping them communicate in an informal settings and find better ways to connect with each other even on an emotional level.
Remote work takes all of it away and adds this invisible burden to navigate through your teams thought process. That alone is a huge factor for me to make sure there is a balance between remote work and office visits.
Like you, I don't think it can be done away with entirely. But, seemingly, I don't see this quite as binary as many here do. This doesn't have to be an all remote or no remote proposition. This could easily be a three or four day a week, remote position, with one day set aside to come in and have meetings/Agile development, what have you, team spirit a awards, maybe lunch. The days could be scheduled out so the real estate needs would be smaller than the company is, as a whole, making it beneficial for the company on a cost level and it helps with traffic congestion levels (assuming there were mass adoption).
I worked freelance for a number of years and I found that I am the same as you; I miss the social interactions.
Since I had no options to work in an office - I didn't have one - I decided to start working in a co-working space.
The co-working space cost me money I would otherwise not have spent but the impact on my mental health was great. I got a regular group of "colleagues" and it clearly divided my home life and work life.
I would definitely recommend it once we're all out of lockdown.
I'm surprised nobody has really pointed out - living through a lockdown and global pandemic is a hugely stressful, scary, and isolating experience. Especially if you're living alone, or with roommates that you're not very close with. I'm pretty introverted and I still feel that way, don't be too hard on yourself for having those feelings.
I would be cautious about overfitting too much to this exact scenario though. Normally even if you were working from home, you could still have a very active social life, get lunch with nearby friends who also work from home, do activities after work, go out on the weekends, etc. I know people that are extroverted and have really enjoyed working from home.
And even if it's really not for you, as other comments have pointed out, there will still certainly be co-located workplaces in the future. Even if almost every company were to go remote, you're definitely not the only one that likes being around other people and I'm sure companies will accomodate this (whether it's a small optional company office, or paying for employees to use a co-working space like a We Work, etc.)
I don't mean anything against you personally but I am strongly disapprove of people who socialize excessively at work. It is distracting, annoying, and worst of all passive-aggressive because you can't stop someone from socializing with you without making yourself seem unchill, throwing your career in the trash. You also can't take a break from socialization or else you make yourself a target.
In sum, the social aspect really is the worst part of engineering in Silicon Valley, and I have half a mind to do something on my own so I no longer have to entertain mediocre engineers with terrible interests.
So, I would love to work for a place that was fully remote. It would be paradise to me.
I work at an agency where this is understood. It's headphones on all day. Socialising happens at lunch and if you don't want to join in you can have your lunch early or late. Socialising also happens after work and you can go home if you don't want to join in.
Part of the reason this happens is because every task is estimated and timed. Over time the estimates have become fairly accurate so you can't get away with dossing the whole day.
I'm no social butterfly but I feel the same way. Working in an office gives me regular light social contact that would be very tiring to get otherwise.
I never liked working from home before this whole covid situation when the office had a lot of interactions.
But with the whole office working remotely, virtual hang out sessions, asynchronous communications, everyone joining remotely for office updates etc etc. I hate to admit it but I quite enjoy it now. I feel more productive. If a company sets up the right culture for remote work, it's not that bad.
Working from home is a challenge, there’s no doubt about that, but assuming some return to normalcy, you don’t have to work from your house or apartment.
Remote work means you can work wherever you want, you can go to a coffee shop for a few hours, you can head to your town’s local library, a coworking space. You can take an extended trip and live out of a van.
Once starlink is up, if you can get away with high latency, you can work from the middle of Greenland if you wanted to.
Working from home, which is really working from wherever you want, is about the flexibility and control to work how, when and where you want.
I do hope that large tech companies like twitter leave their offices open, because that’s also a piece of the remote work puzzle. Just like when we switched from cubicles to open offices, it would be nice to be more thoughtful about remote work AND an in office hybrid situation.
> Once starlink is up, if you can get away with high latency
Off topic but, the latency will be better than cable. They're low altitude satellites. There was even talk of using Starlink for New York / London HFT, because signals travel faster in space than they do in fiber optic (some fraction of the speed of light).
I miss the "buzz" of human interaction that TV in the background never gives, but I can usually get that from Starbucks.
I'm an introvert, and I've been doing independent consulting over the phone for clients for, gosh, 7-or-so years now, and I love talking to my clients, but I don't want to be in the office with them.
One of my sons is about to go bat-shit crazy. The other loves his ability to get tasks in the morning and focus.
I guess we are all wired different.
I was in the process of putting together a "Remote First" business plan, for my next venture, where -- there simply was no home office.
But reading comments like yours really brings home how bad an idea that might be, because I'd be losing out on incredible talent by doing so.
BTW: My current main client has an office (mostly shut down), but I've made it a point to take out a different engineer for lunch (of something similar, depending on the lockdown harshness), 3 times a week (we're small, so I tend to take out everybody for lunch, including my boss) about every six weeks. That's not enough ... but it's the little things that make you feel connected, right? We had a young (28 y.o.?) superstar that was about to lose his shorts release week about two weeks ago and simply bringing to my place with pizze and Netflix and Nintendo (we got shitfaced and he beat my ass at Super Mario Cart), it was good. He felt better, I felt better, nobody got laid, and we both woke up refreshed...
I think you have a solid point that people need people. But, my question is: Can this be done virtually?
I'm a USian, but I lived in Japan for over 10 years, and my mother always wanted to see me, but I never understood why, when I could read her voice better over the phone than in person. She wanted to see me because she could read my body language better in person than over the phone (which I did not like, actually), but is there a way via which you can feel connected without being in the same room? My girlfriend (I live in Texas) is in Taiwan and we have pretty engaging conversations every day and she comes to see me (or vice versa) about 10 times/year. Would that kind of work satisfy you, or do you literally need to see people every day? (As an introvert, I guess I don't know how extraverts work).
Anyway - A bit more disclosure than I usually do - but I am sincerely interested in your perspective.
Many comments that I have read here take one side or the other. Maybe we need to realize that it is just the right thing for some and doesn't work for others. Realities in life are often complex.
WFH without a choice to come to office is pure suffering. I really miss the interactions with my coworkers before COVID. I also miss time I can grab a book from the shared book-self and find an empty office and just do reading for one hour.
If I have a choice to go back to office, I will take it anytime.
This time is not a great example of Remote working, it would be as sad and stressful (maybe more) if you were forced to live in the actual office and share the same space with all your coworkers every day without being able to leave.
on top of the actual stress given by just looking at the current state of the world.
Just commenting to say that I feel similarly to you, and I seem to be the only one among my coworkers that feels it to this extent. Good to know that there are others out there.
It might be due to your home sitation as well. I have my wife and kids, so I have the opportunity to go and chat with them or grab some lunch. I remember when I WFH'ed on my own as a singleton and I did not like it as much, as I was on my own for a good 8 hours a day. We are very social creatures. You only have to look a prisons. You're surrounded by criminals, quite a few who are manipulative / hostile or just hard work from untreated mental conditions, yet the form of punishment is to place you on your own into Solitary confinement.
If you were working from home under normal circumstances you could still be a "social butterfly" after work. But anyway, you have the right attitude when you say you'll leave if it goes remote and you don't like that. That's exactly what people should do. Fixing your problems usually starts with yourself.
As someone on the more extroverted side, I see office work as an easy source of meaningful social stimulation / bonding (well, assuming I like my coworkers) with little personal setup required on my end. Although the in-person component can be a distraction, I mostly saw it as a source of energy and creativity. I met some of my best friends at work.
I've been working from home for about 2 years, a legacy consequence of a few acquisitions. Despite its perks, I don't think that I would've stayed with it past the first year if not for 1) a local set of friends that I could still take breaks / lunches with 2) going to the corporate office once a month for about a week which allowed me to form a nice social network in the mothership city.
But covid-19 stopped both, and I'm stuck with this ennui that's been hard to shake.
I've been very interested in remote work, like you said you were, and I'm worried about the same issues you discuss here. However, one of the things I've seen that I hope will mitigate these issues is the idea of not working at home, but still working remote. For example, getting work done at a coffee shop or public library, instead of home.
I'm worried that mixing my work and personal life too much will be a big strain on my mental health, but I plan to work at home as little as possible in the future, while still trying to work remote to avoid having to commute and enjoy a more flexible schedule. I hope this idea will help you!
I love the flexibility of WFH but worry about people's mental health in the long term if too many did it too much for too long. (Once the pandemic is over)
I ranted about this today [1]. For many the separation of home and office is healthy. Different people, different social interactions, etc.
And for many, an office is where they make new friends, meet their partner etc.
Long ago, I thought remote working was awesome. Then I learned to appreciate working in a team, and I thought remote working was overrated. When the COVID crisis hit and we were forced to work from home, I was surprised how much more productive I became. But that was the first couple of weeks. The focus is wearing off, and I miss my team and the office environment. It helps that I've got a really cool team.
I think the best case (for me personally) is both... 2-3 days per week from the office, and 3-2 days from home. You talk with people, socialize, hear all the gossip (from non-work related, to work related - eg. aout someone who's working on some interesting new project, etc.), but still don't have to drive to work 3 times a week, and can work in your underwear.
What I do is to treat work as work only, while cultivating a rich social life outside of it.
I still have some friends at work, but to be honest: I never really did well with random people, usually those that I consider friends I chose since we have similar interests/vibe/philosophy.
As counterpoint, I love working from home. Pre-COVID I'd usually work from home 4-5 days a week. My focus at home is always way better than in the office (though a noisy open-plan office and a culture of interruptions is a factor as well). One nice benefit around focus is that when I'm having trouble focusing at home, I don't feel as guilty (or try to cover it with make-work) as I do when I'm at the office in the same situation.
I'm also a very social person, but my non-work time is my social outlet (though I still get some "lower-quality" social time over Slack and Zoom during work hours). When the company was smaller (a couple hundred people, now we're over 3k), I certainly spent more social time at the office. But these days I prefer to just work hard during work hours, and meet up with friends (who are often also co-workers) after work.
But at the same time, I love that working at home gives me the flexibility to cook lunch with my girlfriend or take a break for a walk or even just stare out the window in the middle of the afternoon. While my commute isn't bad (25 min transit ride or 45 min walk), I don't mind getting that time back, either. Instead I can get up and go for a 30 minute run, and start work at the same time.
So the COVID rules have left me in roughly the same situation as I was before, at least work-wise (I miss seeing my friends like crazy). Fortunately I don't have kids; nearly everyone I know with kids is finding it impossible to juggle them being home all the time with getting their work done.
It's really interesting though to see how this sort of thing affects people differently (and I'm genuinely sorry you're having such a bad time!). I expect the incidence of work-from-home will increase a lot even after we've stopped social distancing, but there will still be a strong (but newly-flexible) office culture.
I'd like to say that I'm enjoying it too. If my coworking space was open I'd feel compelling to go because otherwise I'd miss out on interesting conversations and connections.
But with FOMA out of the way - I'm happy as larry staying in and having those same conversations selectively and remotely.
Have you tried a co-working space, even if just part-time? You get the social interactions but can work at the "office" or home as you wish. And if conversing with a co-tenant, you have no concern that you're dragging down your own business by distracting a colleague!
I'm the opposite. I think it's just a personality trait. I'm more introverted and socially anxious so I feel much more comfortable at home by myself. I've been remote for 8 years now and I hope I never have to go back to an office.
I'm an extreme introvert and I've found WFH to be very challenging. Part of the problem is that the engineering team at my startup is still figuring out what to build and design sessions over Zoom feel incredibly frustrating and unproductive compared to a shared office with a whiteboard.
I can't imagine forced remote for all employees would ever become the norm. It feels like likely that companies would move from dedicated offices to leasing co-working spaces for those that want it.
Most social butterflies aren’t going to experience the extreme symptoms you describe, but it sucks and I’m sorry.
I invite you now to consider that a much milder version of these is what introverts deal with almost all the time due to the norms of society (which are biased toward social butterflies). We have to learn to overcome and adapt to these difficulties early in life, and for some of us that struggle is real (and life-long).
My counterpoint: From day #1 I always hated office jobs. I hated that management cared so much what time we showed up at the office (they'd all pretend to not care, but then use it against you). I hated being locked there until 5:30pm or whatever was the "appropriate" time to leave even if I'd finished my work by 3pm and no longer had the mental energy to be productive (I remember one time during my first job getting a lot of work done all morning/afternoon, and leaving at 3pm. A couple hours later I get a text asking where I was, and I said I left, and they're like "you just left? lol you're not supposed to do that". I'm think wtf? So I can sit there for 2 hours with some code on my screen doing nothing and that's fine, but I'm not allowed to leave after a 4-5 hour focused coding session? Nobody's really productive after ~4 hours of deep focus anyways).
I hated daily standups, where every morning we have to justify our existence and repeat what's already on the Jira board to some product manager who for whatever reason isn't obliged to give us their status update. I hated all the other numerous pointless agile meetings - backlog refinement, backlog grooming (once got accused of not appearing attentive enough in meetings). I hate open offices, where you have no privacy, have to listen to other peoples' conversations, and constantly feel like you're being watched and paranoid that somebody might catch a glance at your monitor the second you took a 5 minute break from work. I hate having to be surrounded by boring co-workers with no personality all day, in offices where most people eat alone at their desks in front of their computer screens (I never understood this, are people actually working when they eat in front of their computer monitors? You're sitting there for 8 hours and you're so busy you can't take 30 minutes to eat your lunch without being glued to the screen?)
I've been working remotely since last year and I am significantly happier. 98% of that "office bullsh!t" vanished overnight. No commuting. No daily standups. Less pointless meetings (it's like remote workers don't need meetings to bullsh!t meetings to rationalize being stuck in an office for 8 hours). I've traveled the world. At ~$200k/yr I make less than I would in SF, but it's a very comfortable living practically anywhere else in the world since my expenses are a fraction what they were before, and I don't need to be locked in to a lease. When it's 2pm and I'm not feeling productive, I just close my laptop and do something else (instead of trying to figure out how to blow the next 3 hours at the office). When I need to go to the grocery store or gym, I go. If I want to spend a month in Hawaii, I do it.
Remote work certainly has its challenges - you need to be disciplined, have a comfortable workspace ideally separate from your home so you're not stuck in the same place all day (I like coffee shops), do other activities that get you outside the harm (a little more difficult now with COVID), you can't just walk over to someone's desk so people need to be available (not necessarily on a second's notice, but within some acceptable range such that time isn't wasted being blocked), and you have to know when to turn off and go offline. You can't rely on co-workers for your social life anymore, though I don't think I ever had more than 2-3 real friends at any office job in terms of anyone I still keep in contact with.
So it's funny to me seeing occasional comments on remote work posts talking about how much they like working in an office. Personally offices have always been the bane of my existence, and there are few thoughts more repulsing then being trapped in some office for 8 hours/day. To be fair I once worked out of the office of a company I was working remotely for and really enjoyed it because it was a tiny startup with cool people who didn't care when or what time I showed up since I had been hired on purely remote terms and was only at the office voluntarily. So the problem is not the office itself, but the idea of being locked inside for designated hours, and the other bullsh!t management practices generally prevalent in office jobs especially at bigger companies.
I think this is the hugest news yet. It suddenly opens the pool of candidates to all across the country.
I expect other tech giants will follow suit.
Those who previously can't afford or don't want to live in big cities like NYC/Seattle/SF because they are older, have families, or various other reasons now are included in the candidate pool.
This can go two ways: either the local software business will have to compete with FAANG salaries, or there will be jumps from senior developers, experienced developers, and many smarter/more capable developers from smaller software business to FAANG due to salary/perks attraction.
Whatever the case is, suddenly fresh graduates, mid level developers, senior developers, are now competing on the same pool. It is getting even more real to compete in the high FAANG salary job openings now.
This serves as a reminder for us, whether fresh graduates, mid level, or even seniors, to always to keep your edge. DS&A grinding, system design, etc, do whatever you can to not lose your edge.
As a matter of fact, I think almost all knowledge workers will find themselves in this situation. If you are a knowledge/office worker, huge competition looms over the horizon. Never lose your edge.
I think you are overestimating the size of the eligible labor supply increase. Just for Google, for 2017-2019 the number of H1B workers sponsored was 22k. For the same period the increase in number of full time employees was 40k (couldn’t find the figure for US only but fair to assume majority is US-based). So more than half of the new employers are supplied internationally. Does the geo-unlocked US supply pose a substantial competition to that? I don’t see how. FAANG salary is a pretty damn strong incentive to overcome that geo-friction to begin with.
If anything, if the twitter trend follows, FAANG salaries will lose heat. For the majority of the employees, a good chunk of the paycheck goes to housing costs. Wider WFH adoption will ease the overly localized housing demand, even with several days of WFO, longer commutes will be much more tolerable and the housing spread will increase. That would mean acceptance of lower salaries and lowering of housing costs over time.
One competing factor; as the seniority increases, the say on WFH policies increases, also the possibility of housing ownership increases (whether as primary residence or also with rental properties). That creates a perverse incentive to not let people go away in aggregate. Not saying individual managers will think this way explicitly, but might have an indirect influence.
I'm curious - you seem to be saying that FAANG companies can't find enough employees, but your support for the point is that Google hired a significant amount of H1B workers. However, I've read/seen that many H1B workers work for significantly less, and under more pressure, because they are trying to become citizens in the US. Is it possible that the reason for FAANG companies hiring so many H1B workers isn't due to shortage of qualified new employees, but instead because they are more efficient workers, due to the pressures and lower salary?
I went studied CS in Idaho and know many of my peers took significantly lower paying jobs than they are qualified for so they could remain in the area. I'm certain at least some of them would rather work for larger companies with higher salaries and better benefits (and more prestige), if it didn't mean moving into the BIG CITY and leaving their friends/family behind.
What's stopping someone from moving to SF for higher comp on hiring, then getting a P.O. box or friend's mailing address in SF and moving back to work from lower cost area after some time?
Is your employer really going to decrease your salary after the fact? Can you file taxes in your lower cost of living state after you lock in your high SF comp package and never notify your employer but still pay your taxes in the state you moved back to?
Note: I don't condone illegal behavior just thinking of edge cases that benefit us tech workers.
Google files 6.5k H1-B applications per yr which includes transfers (https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2019-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.asp...). To assume all of this goes to new employees is misleading since Google has attrition too. So assuming 10% attrition, Google needs to fill in that 10% and add more employees. Your argument conveniently assumes that H1s are only going to net new employees vs. those that fill the gap too.
H1B and GC sponsorships come from the same pool. In other words, a Green Card application is sponsored for H1 candidates. You are double counting your numbers.
I do agree that this expectation that one sitting in Ohio will command the same salary working for a FAANG company is just wrong. Very likely, the companies will adjust their salaries based on where the person is.
> FAANG salary is a pretty damn strong incentive to overcome that geo-friction to begin with.
This is really only true for certain segments of the population. In my early to mid 20s, I moved cross country numerous times. Now I hope I never have to move again. And if I did, it wouldn't be to the Bay Area or Seattle.
So I'm not sure your statement that "more than half of new employers[sic] are supplied internationally" is true, because the H-1B numbers include renewals.
If anything I suspect a large number of remote jobs will lower demand for visa sponsorship since the candidate pool is no longer localized. One huge advantage of visa employees is that they tend to be more mobile, as in moving to where the jobs are, which is important when there is a divide between candidate selection and geographic availability.
FAANG companies have already been trying to hire in US cities outside of Silicon Valley and Seattle in order to cut costs. Austin in particular comes to mind.
It turns out to be fairly difficult to recruit engineering talent in the United States outside of major metropolitan areas. It also turns out that when tech companies start to hire people in a new city, the cost of living in that city rises substantially -- again, Austin in particular comes to mind.
In the end, if tech compensation decreases substantially I don't think it will be because of remote work, but rather because the recession will kill a lot of startups and the same amount of engineering talent will be chasing a smaller number of jobs, thereby giving employers more leverage.
> It also turns out that when tech companies start to hire people in a new city, the cost of living in that city rises substantially -- again, Austin in particular comes to mind.
That is inevitable if more housing is not built. If demand rises and supply doesn’t, or rises slower than demand rents and house prices rise. Or you could be like Tokyo with population growing 50% over the last twenty years and flat housing costs.
That’s a great example of why restricting to offices doesn’t work for expanding your labor pool significantly.
If a company starts a new office in Austin and they had one in the bay, now they are realistically only tapping the additional talent in Austin. There isn’t a huge chunk of people willing to relocate to Austin that wouldn’t relocate to the bay.
Removing location restrictions all-together is a completely different ballgame because it opens the entire country up, not just one city.
You are wrong that FAANG companies will pay the same salary as you make in SF if you are in a low cost state like Indiana. I have a friend at one of those companies and they were running a survey to gauge employee's keenness for permanent wfh - and they were very clear that employee's salary will be adjusted based on which city they are based in. So, while this is still healthy, since FAANG pays pretty well, but don't expect half a million dollar working from your house in Indiana.
Just want to point out that there's no rational basis for this argument unless the employee in SF is much more productive.
To put it another way, do you currently see pay adjustments based on housing costs for employees living in SF? Have you ever heard of differences across employees simply because one of them has a more expensive house?
Google pay varies by office (quite a lot) and they're upfront about it but it has nothing to do with housing costs. It's based on the cost of hiring in the local market.
I am voluntarily transferring from Google SF to Google London and I am taking a significant salary cut. London isn't really any cheaper to live in, but you can hire good developers for much less in Europe.
I'd be really interested in how they plan to implement this. I'd certainly hope it would be more sophisticated than a linear adjustment of salary based on differences in the cost of living.
I live and work out of St. Louis at the moment, and I've spent a bit of time evaluating FAANG salaries in relation to the cost of living in their relevant areas. While in most cases it seemed I could maybe get 1.5x to 2x my St. Louis salary, I was looking at around a 5x increase in housing costs alone. It never made any sort of financial sense to make the move (as much as I would've liked to).
Of course the most sensible approach would be to offer just above market rate in whatever the local market is. That can be awfully hard to determine though. It's much more a function of local supply and demand than anything that correlates to cost of living.
They didn't say that though, so the whole "you're wrong" is unwarranted.
They said local companies will have to compete with FANG salaries. To your point these would likely be cost of living adjusted, but would almost certainly be higher than the current average in most Midwestern cities.
So they were running a survey gauging whether it's possible to pay people less to work from home, but do we know the result of that survey? Maybe they find out that they cannot hire the same talent for less money in Indiana.
What's stopping someone from moving to SF for higher comp on hiring, then getting a P.O. box or friend's mailing address in SF and moving back to work from lower cost area after some time?
Is your employer really going to decrease your salary after the fact? Can you file taxes in your lower cost of living state after you lock in your high SF comp package and never notify your employer but still pay your taxes in the state you moved back to?
Note: I don't condone illegal behavior just thinking of edge cases that benefit us tech workers.
Most FAANG have a high cost of living band and a regular band. The high cost of living band pays 15-30% extra for living in the Bay Area/NYC. Everywhere else pays the same whether it's Boston, Detroit, or the middle of the desert.
Maybe it's the other way around: due to increased supply, total package of FAANG engineers will drop. That's not necessarily a bad thing though. We've been enjoying unprecedented packages for many years. It may be a good time to distribute some of the wealth to other parts of the country.
There's no wealth there. All Google employees get something like 25 billions a year. The US budget is measured in trillions and to cover up just this recession alone, Fed created 6 trillions, or 240 years worth of wages for those employees. Do I need to say that in ten years there will be another recession, where Fed will create 20 trillions?
The pool of qualified software engineers outside of high-cost urban areas is pretty shallow. I run a 100% remote company in the midst of staffing up. We're looking for database internals people. There are not a lot of qualified candidates in, say, Oklahoma.
If COVID-19 really helped people to work from the Ouachitas at reasonable salaries, it would be completely awesome. But we're a long way from that. I love remote work and would like to see more people do it. But the past history of epidemics (e.g., 1918, the 1665 London plague, etc.) indicates people will go back to previous behavior--favoring urban areas--once the crisis passes.
I have fantasies about a homestead in the shadow of Cavanal Hill. If I could raise chickens and goats, and maybe a family, all while working remote, I'd truly have the best our age has to offer.
There are a lot of us out here in the middle who want that.
I get your skepticism, but I'm going to hope against hope that telepresence technology will continue to improve and make that possible.
That assumes they restrict remote work to America for work that was done previously in the states. If this picks up, and there are no legal restrictions on what country a remote employee must be in, then the low end might just go much lower than what it currently is in small cities.
> there are no legal restrictions on what country a remote employee must be in
Working remotely from another country is easy. Paying somebody in another country is not easy at all. Even with specialized providers it is a substantial hassle. Without it you pretty much better give up - the chances you get all the payments, taxes and paperwork right is minimal, and that country's tax/regulatory authorities would be more than happy to fine you and/or your workers if you don't. In the best case, in worse case they might just seize your money intended for payroll and keep it until you figure things out.
And just to make your point explicit, if everyone moves to local-remote, then the move to hiring cheap and top-notch Bulgarian or Romanian programmers is even easier.
> This can go two ways: either the local software business will have to compete with FAANG salaries, or there will be jumps from senior developers, experienced developers, and many smarter/more capable developers from smaller software business to FAANG due to salary/perks attraction.
I think if it's widespread it would be a little of both with some extra effects to consider. Not only will FAANG organizations get a wider pool of applicants which will drive down salaries for FAANG orgs, AND other businesses will how have to deal with the fact that their technology workers are part of a much larger market than they were previously, which will drive up salaries for those workers remotes, but there could be some very interesting delayed effects. How many FAANG workers now would opt to move farther away and keep their position, which will depress (that is, realign with reality to some small degree) the real estate market in areas like Seattle and San Francisco? What does that do to salaries later (likely a much smaller effect, but maybe non-negligible)?
Telecommuting has been hailed as one aspect of saving the suburban and rural life for a long time. Maybe we'll actually see some of it now.
What happens if there's a net reduction in people living in San Francisco and surrounds over 10 years, say 10%? I mean, it sounds unlikely, but so didthe idea of so many people staying inside for months at a time, and everyone switching to telecommuting so fast. All these things are related, and with major changes in one, relatively rapid change in things that related to it can be expected. At this point I'm actually thinking it's possible we could shift to UBI of some sort, and just a few months ago I didn't see any way that could happen without a major economic disruption, but hey, we've already got that.
Personally I would not move away from west coast. Mediterranean weather is gift from god. Plus it's so close to many good ski resorts. Being able to enjoy outdoors throughout the year and being able to go out to ski every week is priceless.
We will see how things play out, but WFH success is not guaranteed. Managing remote workers requires different skills which most managers today do not have.
For now, most big companies have enough cash and are primarily focusing on making sure workers are not going crazy rather than on turning out new software. Give it another 3-4 months though and those companies will have to pivot back to real development which may be harder than they expect if WFH is still practiced en masse. My 2c.
Everyone is thinking about picking talent from across the country. We should be thinking from across the world. Get ready for high salaries to start going down once everything starts to get stable.
This is so absurd. We struggle to hire even remote work around the country. There just aren't enough qualified people for some of these more senior positions.
"Never lose your edge."
How about, enjoy your free time. Enjoy your friends and family. Work hard at your job, but maintain the division.
This hyper-productivity porn is a net negative. There is competition in this industry, but nowhere near enough to leave talented engineers fearing for anything. Not on a near time-horizon, at least.
At the end of the day there’s a pay band in HR and while COL may be 3x in SF than Oklahoma, but either it’s 600k in San Fran or 250k in Oklahoma, which is nearing physician’s pay in many smaller states. Pay will go up in smaller states and pay will come down in SF/SV areas. People in LCOL areas will make top end salaries in their respective geographic areas and will see the best quality of life improvement. $250k in Oklahoma is going to be much better quality of life than $600k in San Jose for some people who have a spouse and 2 kids. And then over time they can hire a lot more people at 200-250k rather than 600k.
It seems likely local salaries in smaller cities will go up, since they already have in response to the first wave of remote friendly startups and companies. Now, most of them can't offer public company compensation options but can compete in other areas.
But what about hanging around the water cooler so I can colab on some random ideas I overheard!!! my whole go to market and product strategy depends on this!!!!
It would be good if more tech companies embraced this. I bet if they need tools for themselves we’ll see a lot of progress in remote collaboration tools.
To make this work I wonder how executives will adapt. In my company the higher you go up the chain, the more they want face to face communication. I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes away an important skill set of theirs.
Maybe, but it would also be good if more (tech) companies offered a decent working environment.
That's coming from personal experience btw, where most jobs / assignments I've had, it was usually open plan, flexible seat arrangements.
I have a new job now where I have a fixed desk with a set of drawers. It's a breath of fresh air and honestly it sounds so stupid and trivial. But employers don't have their employees' best interest in mind.
My cynical take on this move is that the company doesn't have to pay as much for office space + worker transport anymore.
I'm an ardent supporter of remote work, and I wouldn't go back to non-remote work without a hefty pay raise, but I think I probably would have considered office jobs during my last search if the offices I'd worked in previously had actually been pleasant.
Open office plans, low cubicle walls, cubicle sharing, frequent noise and disrespect of focus, flimsy banged up office chairs and equipment, no budget for standing desks, the lack of real employee lounges and couches to both work and chill out at, strict clocking in and out, and insufficient meeting space are chasing away good employees, especially now that we're all forced to work remotely. More people won't be willing to go back if they can help it.
Notice I mentioned nothing about free snacks, foosball tables, beer on tap, etc. I'd trade all of that for some semblance of serenity in the office.
> My cynical take on this move is that the company doesn't have to pay as much for office space + worker transport anymore.
Don't forget it removes the work/home barrier. Now you are at work 24/7 and on call at all hours. Work and productivity has consumed most of modern life. The last bastion of freedom from work/productivity was the home. Now people are celebrating the loss of that precious personal space. Strange.
My even more cynical take is that companies are finding employees are way more productive working from home. I think part of it could be that with COVID-19, a lot of us are looking for an outlet for our energies, and so are working harder than normal.
As an executive (Product and Technology specifically) at a mostly work from home company: I find that engineers can do a pretty good job of effectively collaborating thanks to PR's, Slack, JIRA, and a host of other asynchronous tools.
It's on the product side that things are tougher. Great product work is often about finding meaningful insights in the data available to you, and that often involves long conversations between people with lots of different viewpoints. There's something about doing that in person that is just really hard to replicate remotely.
Even getting the environment exactly right only goes so far. I find that over Zoom people are just a little bit less engaged and that means getting to those really important insights takes a lot longer.
Previous to covid we had solved this by colocating our product team and then bringing the engineering team together once a quarter with product folks to engage them in those conversations. Now we're just sort of feeling our way though it...
It sounds like the product people are sitting in long meetings. Have you considered the idea that people were already disengaged in those meetings, they were just putting up a better front because they could tell everyone was watching them closely in person?
And now that they are at home, they are not trying as hard to pretend they are listening closely, and since they are more comfortable, they are staying in the meetings and saying what they want? Whereas before they would let the most assertive person talk, and after a few minutes could not tolerate the in person meeting anymore and so pretended that they were all in agreement so you would let them go, knowing they would work out the actual details amongst themselves later?
And now they don't have the option of working things out after the meeting, which is another reason the meetings are taking longer.
The biggest issue for you is probably that you have a lot of wasted time where only a part of the team is working together in the meeting but other people who are not involved in that part are just waiting for them to finish.
Do some research on the tools that engineers use to work asynchronously and train your product team. Also consider smaller video chat meetings, and chat rooms, etc.
As you move up the chain in global companies such as Twitter, it becomes more likely that you'll have a superior or direct report based in a different location than you, and this has been true for years. The "people person" executive theory only holds for companies that do not already have a substantial number of teams that are not all located in the same place.
I'm not sure how your conclusion follows - it's undoubtedly true that more and more folks are involved in teams that at least partly remote. However, the skills needed to manage these effectively are mostly the same as co-located teams. To whatever degree "people person" was needed, it seems mostly the same to me.
you have to fly a lot though, live in hotels for weeks here and there. and compensation is aligned to performance in a much deeper way than at IC level
We are a small SAAS startup that is funded by a slightly larger architectural services firm. My partner was staunchly against WFH until he saw productivity rise and employee satisfaction go through the roof when the business was forced into WFH. While he will continue to come to the office (because he is an old dog), everyone else is WFH forever. He owns the building so i'm sure he'll attempt to rent out the vacated office space. When he realizes nobody is going to want his office space due to severe oversupply, I wouldn't be surprised if he sells the building or converts the land into something more profitable. You might ask, what changed? He assumed that people who work from home won't be effective. He lacked trust. The employees proved to be trustworthy.
Frankly, I dread the situation where working from home is the norm and suddenly a core part of my job is building remote working relationships that I find easy to build in person.
People are underestimating the issues which need to be overcome with WFH
Infrastructure:
Do homes have chargers, desks, screens? If not people will soon get carpal tunnel or lose productivity.
Internet/VPN security costs are real.
Productivity creep :
Some of the main issues with WFH have been work hour creep. Managers and other employees feel its easier to make requests for more time given that you are now a few feet from your laptop. Lack of discipline also means that people now work longer.
Rewards and promotions
I can't find it right now, but I recall WFH resulting in lower pay relative to people with the same qualifications who went to office.
Mental costs:
One of the main issues with WFH has been loneliness. Fixing this requires immense effort to recreate physical proximity.
Creativity is also lost when you cant engage in banter and catching up with people.
Anecdotally I'm not really sure how much of people persons higher ups are, at least in engineering. Pretty much all of the SVPs / CTOs at the medium to large (but not huge) companies I've worked were not really people people. They've been somewhat socially awkward and naturally introverted. They can stand in front of a crowd and speak of course, and present in relatively high pressure situations, but I don't think they actually enjoy dealing with people all that much.
> I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes away an important skill set of theirs.
This might also be a trust thing. Studies have found that in-person social interaction leads to increased levels of trust among the group, but remote social interaction doesn't have this affect. The higher you go up the management chain, the more trust is required to perform your job effectively. ICs usually work under well-defined, measurable conditions: you can determine from their work product whether an engineer, salesperson, or designer is being productive. Executives do not work under these conditions, and arguably the job of an executive is to define those metrics. To get everyone rowing in the same direction requires an immense amount of trust and collaboration amongst the high-level leadership of the company, and it seems like it'd be challenging to achieve that virtually.
A potential compromise I am hoping for would be an increased willingness of companies to open satellite or smaller offices in secondary or tertiary real estate markets.
I would love for more companies to embrace this just to open up the candidate pool for positions.
There are so many positions at Microsoft, for example, that I would have loved to apply for, but they require you to be in Redmond, and I'm just not in a position to relocate.
Just so you're aware, it is possible in Microsoft to some extent, just not very publicly visible (the careers site doesn't help you find these jobs).
I started working in one team and switched to another team internally because they are pro-remote and I plan on moving back to Australia. Broadly across Microsoft there are also about ~30 other engineers already working from Australia for Redmond-based teams.
Completely agree - I've tried and failed many times to move from Orlando to Bay area. FAANG (finance work) wasnt willing to pay to relocate so they always went with local candidates over me. There are little to no interesting companies in my area. I want to work and help build the future. I was willing to take a paycut from MCOL to HCOL area for jobs and willing to go down in seniority for a chance to work at a big company in the Bay area. It would be nice if they finally start opening the applicant pool to those in other cities.
It's more about being effective managers. There's tons of writing and proper follow up and prep work necessary to make remote work happen and most people aren't just that diligent to do it regularly.
Most managers especially at the top are also not the most diligent people, they have employees to do the stuff that they dislike doing so when they are faced with having to do more prep work and move at what they consider a slower speed (they are wrong, all that prep work and due diligence pays off, Bezos and Amazon are a great example of that) they recoil.
There's lots of communication which is hard to do remote. The water cooler is o e thing. But even in a meeting when presenting something the feedback is limited. When sitting in a room it's simpler to see whether people are following and one should go faster or iterate on a point. Also one can simpler intercept with a question or comment. The text based back channel is limited for that.
(I WFH exclusively for 10+ years and still regularly miss the office for anything which isn't deep down coding, but requires communication)
Why do I need either of those things? If I'm going to work from home permanently then whatever computers I need can come with me. Face-to-face meetings are a justification for middle management to exist; remote work due to pandemic is going to lay bare the stupidity of managers and their ranks will be greatly reduced. I predict that the written word is going to make a big comeback.
Video conferencing is pretty bad IME. I think that all too many companies view Slack as an acceptable option for communication most of the time, and I think that's an extremely inhibiting factor for most remote work. I think some innovation around the tools we use for remote work would be great, fwiw.
Training people, both workers and management, how to work in such environments. Plus for many companies expanding the bandwidth and security for their entry points for the corporate network. This can include locking down connected equipment to block high data volume sites and activities; you cannot believe the number of people who try to stream across their vpn connection.
Not everyone wants to be remote, where I work they asked for volunteers for the first wave and had to turn people down for some groups. For these the separation of work and home is line they don't like to cross.
I've always wondered if that was a side effect of them being slow/bad at typing. Higher ups usually don't end up having to type a lot themselves, and many are bad at it.
That’s mainly because they have better things to do. Where do you think more money is to be made? Worry about your typing or be very good at meeting people?
It is generally an oversight to assume that people have ideal work conditions at home and could be more productive. Going to a reliable and steady office is absolutely salutary for many people. There are trade-offs, yes, but no one-size-fits-all. Physical work location and conditions is one potential issue, and emotional/relational conditions are another. Would we want to overlook these issues while still searching for the best talent for our companies?
It would be good if AWS and GCE were leveraged by workers at home as generic data centers to store their private data
Working on a UI and server for just that. Plug an API key for a cloud provider into the UI which will help users move data from their laptop to a private bucket for example, or spinup basic infra, enable sharing with other users accounts for opt-in data collection
Sell or donate access to specific data in your account on your terms.
The web is dead. With the right tools anyone can leverage the cloud to regain a ton of privacy and control of their data. Maybe we can dismantle through free market effort, the technocracy middleman now that building such software is trivial
Yeah, I get what you mean. Native applications store your data locally, which is privacy-friendly, but sharing is hard. SaaS brought easy sharing of data, but it also brought data mining. So the goal is to have data in the cloud, but isolated, rather than in a big shared database in some SaaS provider.
If you trust the privacy of cloud providers, you can spin up a server and use https://sandstorm.io/, which is designed around that: private infra, with granular sharing of data.
If you don't, you need local compute and encryption. Keybase would be a decent example - while you can't use your own cloud account, they only see encrypted data.
That said, there's a reason a lot of people deleted their Keybase accounts when they got acquired by Zoom. Data mining is very enticing, so outside of projects ran by idealist volunteers - which will always have a hard time competing with funded companies -, how do you keep developers from adding mining abilities even to the native/self-hosted applications?
I work at a large tech company on a young team (average age is late twenties). In my experience many don't view working from home regularly as a benefit. I understand that must change drastically when you're middle aged, have a family to live around and a spacious house in the suburbs. But most younger people want to live in the middle of the city (i.e. small, often shared apartments but a short commute) and have no responsibilities outside of work, in this situation WFH loses a lot of its lustre.
If I could keep my current compensation and move to the low cost of living area where my family is located, I would reach financial independence 10-15 years ahead of my current trajectory with Bay Area rents/costs. I'll settle for the minor inconveniences of WFH any day in order to get a decade of my life to spend with family or to work on my own projects.
I couldn't agree more. If I could work from home permanently I would move far far away from where I am currently living. I would get myself a nice condo or small house, and settle in. Currently, where I live, despite the fact that I make almost 30k/year more than the medium average income I still can only just afford a one bedroom apartment spending the suggested 30% of my income. Imagine being able to buy a house!!!! What a world that would be!!!
I doubt you'd be able to keep that current compensation, though. Most people I've talked with who have moved out of the bay area (or another HCOL area) to somewhere with a lower cost of living have either gotten an immediate pay cut, or their company has told them that they won't be getting pay raises until their pay is in-line with their new local market.
Companies don't do this. They will adjust your salary down based on your city of residence. Square is one example of this. You're not compensated for the value you provide, you're compensated for the cost of living near the office.
You're also now competing against a national talent pool vs locals only
Spent 20 years WFH on various personal projects, earning money on my own, and now I am hired and working from office. Too much freedom can be hard to cope with. A little bit of structure can be great.
Largely the compensation in SV and NYC was high because those were the cultural centers, it is expensive to live there but "everyone" wanted to be there.
Make no mistake - work from home means the salaries are going to regress to the midwest level of pay.
I would imagine salaries might dip because your new "competition" would be anyone in the same timezone (with the requisite skills). However I'd also imagine, if you are good, the offset would be well in your favour.
I got covid and was (and still am) as sick as hell. I'm going to live (not sure if I will get back to 100% yet), and I never thought this kind of sorely needed decentralization would happen in my lifetime. It almost feels like a fair swap, as this is going to be so, so good for humanity. If we can get a decent handle on covid, I'm actually feeling optimistic for my children, for the first time in years.
I want to live in a city with an abundance of arts organizations; but it does seem a bit odd to live in a place that has those things, but can't be accessed.
My understanding is that this has big tax implications (since presumably said low cost of living areas are outside of California). I would love to understand better what sorts of complications WFH bring to the table for those cases (and how they can be mitigated).
I can imagine more companies adopting a cost of living adjustment. There’s also a non trivial tax burden complexity with an employee base spread around the country/world.
If you have great skills you can do that today. If you don't have great skills and a company has made itself amenable to remote work, then why would they hire you at a Bay Area salary instead of firing you and hiring someone already in that location for half your salary?
This makes sense. In my team it’s the same: the young guys like going out together after work and also often don’t have the space at home to set up a good workplace. They also need the most handholding. I remember some discussions a while ago where the conclusion was that it’s hard to onboard juniors remotely and remote is more suitable for experienced people.
When I started as a developer, my team was fully remote (I was the only developer in NYC, most of the rest were in Portugal or elsewhere in the US.) I found it very difficult to ask questions remotely for several reasons: I never knew if I was intruding on somebody else's time, and explaining things over Slack isn't as effective (in retrospect, I should have made more use of video and voice chat). YMMV: some people are probably more bold in asking questions remotely. For newer developers, this is important.
You really can't overstate how useful it is to just plunk your laptop down in front of another developer and ask questions while staring at the same screen.
At my current company, I'm usually co-located with our other developer, which made the process of clarifying things for both of us a lot easier. As I've gained experience, I've found it a lot easier to ask questions remotely: we've made great use of various voice/video/screensharing functionality for this purpose.
I am middle aged, have a family to be around, and a long commute (60 mins morning, 40 mins evening). I have a spacious house and room for a separate office. Yet even I do not like work from home. I don’t like assigning space in my home for my employer’s use. I don’t like having work in my house. It’s probably actually more bearable due to current circumstance-I watch my daughter in mornings, and my wife is here too. If this were normal circumstances and I were here alone all day and connected only through phone and video, I would like this even less. No way I want to keep doing this if I don’t have to.
And some of my staff can’t even do phone calls if their roommate has one at the same time because they have small apartments. I don’t even have that problem.
Not interested in providing rent-free space to my employer.
I perfectly fit the profile you described. I live in SF in a small apt. I can easily afford a much bigger place for the same amount. But working with collegues @ office is a soo much fun. if the company gets fully remote, its really hard to connect with coworkers and hangout.
I used to rock climb around lunch time, do yoga at 3 and go for a cycle with some people in my neighborhood during my last remote setting. Was more social than any office setting.
What about if all of society did this, and you all had a great webcam, and for lunch you went out locally with your local friends, then when you knock off at 5pm you have all agreed to play soccer down the local park at 5:10pm ?
We can have a nice local life that flourishes, once the utterly stupid situation of having everyone converge at the same time on a fixed point is forever slain.
I still remember being such a young programmer -- and I much preferred WFH. I have no car and commuting on foot and via public transport, only to turn up at a noisy, productivity-sapping open-plan office, is tiring. I would rather save that hour and a half each day and just work from home.
Imagine you're 22. For the last 17 years you've showed up every day for an institution. It provided a schedule, a routine, social interaction with a community of peers who share common ground, even explicitly structured extracurricular events.
One day that just comes to a hard stop. You're sitting in your childhood bedroom on a computer. Your friends have all scattered to the wind. What now?
Of course it's possible to build a life from scratch, without the benefit of an institutional attachment. You can enforce a schedule for yourself. You can go chat up strangers in bars or meetup groups or whatever, and build a social network that way. But it's not hard to see how this level of flexibility, so suddenly, could be suffocating.
Contrast with a mid-career professional who already has a spouse, a well-developed social network gathered from the many communities he's been part of over the years, and the structure/routine of childrearing.
The workplace is one of the last places where you're forced to interact face-to-face with a diverse range of people multiple times, on a regular basis. If you're young, and from out of town, you get a lot from that.
Certainly, there are different clubs and groups out there, but the people they attract are fairly homogenous, and monofocused on their topic of interest. There are coffee-houses and bars, but you'd be lucky to interact with anyone there repeatedly in such a way as to form any durable social bond.
The only other quick option for gaining automatic access to a well-rounded social environment that I can think of is a church, but educated young people tend to enter the workforce with a contempt of organized religion that ranges from passive to visceral.
I am of that age and I can say I have hated the last few weeks working from home. I feel isolated and I like talking at work, I also have an easier time actually doing work at a workplace rather than sitting at home, also I just like going out grabbing a few drinks after work.
Of course the latter is more an issue of the pandemic right now than just remote work in principle but I have the sense that remote working also leads to less spontaneous interaction.
Maybe this is true if you are stuck with roommates, but given how terrible most open offices are now the bar is pretty low for home to be better.
My home office in my small 2br city center apartment has a better monitor than the one at my open office workstation, I can listen to whatever music I want, no BS small talk, and I don't feel like there are eyes on me constantly. Plus, commuting sucks no matter where you live, most city dwellers don't live within walking distance of their offices.
I do like the opportunity to socialize w/ coworkers from time to time but 2-3 days/week in office is more than enough for me.
Have you told them (or have they been told) that they can work from somewhere besides there home?
Obviously there is an exception right now, but normally "working from home" means you can work from anywhere you want (different country, parents cottage, coffee shop, outside, where ever).
I work for a tech company and we have people who regularly go to Europe/other places for months and work from there just getting up/working later depending on timezone.
Most people assume that working from home or working remotely means sitting at home at a desk and working the exact same as you would an office. In which case you lose the office communication. But that's wrong.
Working from a separate country isn't usually allowed based on the labor laws of that country, since you are still paying your taxes to your home country while using the infrastructure of another. You can certainly do it, but your company may not want to know you are doing it.
Exactly this! I'm not sure why people assume WFH must mean you're literally confined to your home/apartment for the entire duration of the work day. Unless you have to frequently get on calls requiring a quiet space, you should be fine working from cafes, co-working spaces and yes - even other countries if you so choose to (for short periods of time at least). I've been doing this at my current workplace as have a number of others I know.
Before the current situation, I've had this discussion with various people in the context of space getting tight in some offices. Basically, I was told that a lot of the younger people (mostly not developers in this case) would be looking for another job if they could no longer come into an office. I do know I would probably have hated being forced to work out of my apartment right out of school.
WFH also works for those young people that don't quite live in the middle of the city - say, they would like to live closer to where they play (the ocean, the mountains, on the road, etc).
Im firmly in that demographic. Working from home has been pretty awful; don't have space for a secondary office in my 500sqft of nyc apartment, and have found the whole experience to be terribly isolating. Maybe it's different for people with families, but I'd never give up the perks of city living and office connections to be so alone (regardless on how much extra money I'd be saving).
The tools and processes for remote work are completely different than co-located though. This will force the in-office folks to essentially adopt all of the remote protocols.
IME blended teams are by far the hardest to make work.
In part, I think some of the young there are on to something. I love working remote now, but one thing remote is bad at is training, especially the intensive training you want at a junior level. I would've had a much harder time learning core work skills (how to do actual work, but also time management, communication, ...) without the super close contact you get in person.
Imo, remote is a big perk once you have a couple of years of professional work under your belt, but a real challenge before that point.
> I work at a large tech company on a young team (average age is late twenties). In my experience many don't view working from home regularly as a benefit. I understand that must change drastically when you're middle aged
Yes, and there is some correlation between age and seniority. If companies are so eager to hire senior developers, they might consider the preferences of candidates who have been working long enough to fit that description.
I'm one of these people and I want to be able to do both. Work used to be 10min subway from my place, yet I want to be able to stay home when I don't want to be disturbed at work.
Yeah, I have to be pretty skeptical of the above take, for this reason:
1) I live in San Francisco. A ton of residents here commute to Mountain View and environs for work. A ton.
2) Most of those residents are young.
3) One of the few things that has been reliably proven to improve your happiness - even more than a salary bump! - is reducing your commute time.
4) With WFH (work from home) everyone who commutes from SF to elsewhere could cut their commute from 2 hrs round trip, daily, to 0.
5) Ergo, a ton of young people would quickly see the logic of this: WFH and cut your commute time to 0. They would want this option, and they will take it.
I know this complicated somewhat by the fact that you can work from the buses, but I still don't see the overcoming this widely shared preference, for no commute.
I'm pretty much the demographic described above: on the younger side, and optimized for central location in housing.
I have a fairly small 1BR. I don't really have a proper work environment set up--what's the point of cramming a desk in if I'm going into the office every day? I have no yard, so at the moment fresh air is limited. I work, cook, eat, and sleep within the same three rooms.
That's not even touching on people who paid out the ass to get studios in trendier neighborhoods. Personally, I'd lose my mind.
Contrast this with my parents in the suburbs. It's normally a longer commute, but there's a dedicated office, a back yard, and just generally more breathing room.
I think a lot of this is less WFH-related, and more, y'know, apocalypse-related. I could work from a coffee shop or coworking space. Go to the park. Go out for dinner/drinks in the evening. Hell, I could've gotten a bigger, cheaper place if commute time wasn't an issue.
But for the time being, the sprawl of suburban living seems to have its perks.
Also generally if you live in the suburbs you probably co-habit with your family and probably spend your commuting life wishing you could see more of them (this is orthogonal to the city / suburb question really - it has more to do with the older / younger split).
I work in FAANG and I am really not convinced this is the start of a trend.
First Twitter was already moving towards permanent WFH before the pandemic, it only accelerated their plans. I highly doubt (m)any other companies were also seriously considering that move before the pandemic.
Second, working in a remote only team is very different from working in an office, or even from occasionally working from home. I have seen the best managers get completely clueless when managing full remote people.
Third you lose a lot of things by going full remote. You can no longer have hallway conversations, sharing new ideas over lunch, trying to pitch new ideas organically. You lose a lot of spontaneity by going full remote, which I fully expect to impact innovation potential. Some of the best ideas in my group are things that came up from organic conversations that we have been productizing.
Fourth has to do with company culture. I can't speak for every company, but I know that at my company there is a very clear favoring people local to where the HQ is located, probably at least in part for the reasons above. I don't see that changing easily. East coast to West coast in the same team means you have 3 hours a day where you can't have your whole team available at the same time.
What I expect to happen is most likely much greater flexibility for companies that were not open about it before, but full time remote for everyone seems like a huge stretch even over several years.
I have been fully remote for about 2 years. My personal experience is that collaboration is way easier when being remote. When I need to talk to a team i just drop a line in their slack room and I usually get an answer within minutes. So much easier than walking down the hallway and hoping that someone is in the team office area (not to mention no social awkwardness involved). Also when most people are remote in your company, you are in most hallway discussions! Just subscribe to the channels and read it. Not to mention lurking when high level engineers talk about stuff. I never really interacted with principal level engineers when I worked in an office. Now I just need to know which channel to listen to.
Having a culture that discusses in public channels definitely helps, though many remote organizations aren’t this way unfortunately and silo chatter to known relevant parties vs any interested group.
What do you do about folks who's first language isn't English? Face to face communication is somewhat doable because body language helps to convey the real message but communicating over text is a completely different ball game. So much nuance gets lost
> The value of the valley has always been the hallway chat.
Is it, really? I always hear and read this, but I see very few anecdotes.
In thinking through my own interactions, I'm not sure anything that happened in the hallway, break room, or at lunch table actually contributed much more to the bottom line than conversations I've had over VC and Slack.
That's what they say, but I just don't buy it. In practice even if you get people together in a place with hallways they always tend to stay in their own departments and even at their own desks. Those vibrant conversations you see with carefully selected people from all demographics exist only in marketing brochures.
I'm not super convinced. Most people have never been given the chance to adapt to full-time remote work. And there are many ways to have "hallway conversations."
A lot of people are probably more creative in a textual medium or even talking on the phone where they can't be overheard (I hate the feeling I might be distracting someone).
I wouldn't be surprised if the office squelches a lot of creativity. Of course, it all depends on the office environment and individuals.
>And there are many ways to have "hallway conversations."
At the start of all this I would have agreed but as the weeks go on my coworkers are just getting more and more introverted and you really have to push to get any sort of discussion about product and strategy, everything ends up into a meeting format you can't just do the sitting down, riffing and chatting which is where the actual creative work happens.
Might have a different perspective because I'm more on the design side than the engineering, but I'm very aware none of the most transformative moves in my company were all born out of discussions outside of work in more social settings between designers and engineers, I know some people don't like hearing that but that's the reality at my company at least.
Yep, I can see how FAANGs would be reluctant to adopt remote work. While it can be a fine solution in your run of the mill software team doing boring web or backend work, FAANGs are all about innovation and, often, very technically complex products. The f2f interactions could really foster creativity there (just imagine scientists trying to work out the Manhattan project remotely over Teams...).
Working is not just about work, we're spending a good amount of our time with our colleagues. I cannot imagine me sitting alone in a room, working every day 8 hours for 10-20 years and never meet anyone in my team. All the team building, get a smoke together, off-work activities... are gone. Sounds scary like a chapter in Black Mirror.
In theory you would be trading hanging out with your coworkers for hanging out with your friends, you neighbors, others in your community + a lesser commute. You would definitely lose some and gain some, the question is whether that gain would outweigh the loss. For some people, their lives are organized around work (makes sense, mine defiantly is) so it would be a big shift.
Yeah, calling this a trend would be stretching this a bit. From what I have seen myself and heard from friends in other FAANG or other medium/big tech companies, a lot of
employees prefer to work from office and are not liking the current WFH situation. I know of one survey inside a big company where majority of the people voted for being in the office for at least a few days of the week once the situation is better.
I work for a pretty well-known tech company, and my hypothesis is that we'll switch to a mostly at-home work week, where most people WFH 3 or 4 days a week with one day of the week being designated as a "meeting day" where everyone is in the office.
I don't think this will happen because of people are worried about virus transmission, but instead because most people like working from home and we've proven we can be just as productive when we're out of the office.
That said, I'm one of the few people who like going into an office. There are fewer distractions and better food options. :)
I disagree that this is a likely outcome. For many people, this is a worst of both worlds - still requires all the costs of living within commuting distance of your employer (particularly for SFBA and NYC) and likely shrinks the average size/perks of the office you commute to. Partial remote doesn't seem to solve any problem in a way that is any better than the status quo.
I agree. I would quit. This basically forces employees to get another room as an office. If my employers pays for it, fine. But if they don’t, it’s bs that I’ll have to continue to work from my living room because we don’t have a dedicated office space. It’s driving both me and my SO crazy because we want separate spaces to do our work but we are in a studio/open 1-bedroom.
still requires all the costs of living within commuting distance
If you don't have to go in everyday, the possible commuting distance increases massively. Before the virus, I worked from home and my commute was 160km twice per week by high speed train.
The average American spends 4.3 hours per week commuting. If you go into the office every day, that gives you a 26.1 minute commute radius. If you go into the office twice a week, now your commute radius extends out to an hour.
Take a map around the office where you work. Look at the kinds of home prices you can find an hour out. See how much closer you can be to nature or other particular amenities that matter to you. Would you like to have those with zero total change to your commute time?
Yet, many workers prefer it. For example, my team is 18 persons fully in-office and 4 fully remote (I'm one of the latter). We've been all fully remote for two months now, and today the manager asked: what do you think about making this permanent? And all the 18 colleagues agreed that their preferred solution would be partial remote.
People like their socialization at work. Many also like living in the city anyway (granted, most of my colleagues are young and childless). And outside of extreme cases like SF, a tech salary is enough to rent a decent apartment.
This is already a pretty common situation for many companies (in NYC). A 1 hour+ commute to be more tolerable if you only have to do it twice a week. Fully remote companies, you might see your coworkers in person once a year. That's a big leap for a lot of places to accept.
Yeah I just took a WFH job and if I HAD to be near one city that would really limit my flexibility and is a huge negative. My company does bi-yearly get-togethers, or did.
I am having a very hard time staying motivated in the current context. Kids at home yelling at each other, other coworkers distracted, work tasks badly defined without the ability to verbally hash things out, emotional / mental health stress due to the current scenario.
I don't feel like the current scenario is indicative of a well structured WFH setup, even though we've been doing it for 2 months now.
In short I hope companies don't use this interlude to evaluate WFH productivity, because I think it isn't the best representative.
> work tasks badly defined without the ability to verbally hash things out
The ability to hash things out verbally is a great escape hatch, but it has turned into a crutch. I hope universal WFH will push people to work to a standard where it can be the exception instead of the norm.
> Kids at home yelling at each other, other coworkers distracted
In my experience, working at home isn't much different from working at work. If you don't have a private office with a door, it's going to be very challenging to focus regardless of whether you're sharing space with your coworkers or your family. Long ago I worked in a cube farm that had the depressing gray regularity of a low-effort DOOM wod, and I'm not sure that wasn't better for productivity than the attractive, high-end open plan offices I've worked in since then.
In a couple of years, my wife and I will be living in a different house, and we will both have private offices, cost be damned. I've decided mine can be as small as 10'x6', as long as it has a door and a window.
Yes, it is not representative at all. It's a stressful period, kids are always at home as schools are closed, the lockdown requires more organisation than usual in everyday life and there are less options to relieve stress.
We still manage to work with the same productivity in my company but we already had some experience with WFH.
>we've proven we can be just as productive when we're out of the office.
I think it's very important to realize that if we are or are not productive WFH, there will be others who feel the opposite.
Working from home doesn't work for everyone, or it doesn't work in every case. Maybe it can be further optimized to work better for most cases, but currently it's not.
* Speaking as someone who recently started a new job two weeks before the government SIP for the Bay Area and has had to mostly virtual on-board and ramp-up. It has not been an easy experience. Maybe it's the on-boarding/ramp-up for my team that's not optimized, or maybe it's not easy simply because I'm not already a full-time remote worker already. Some people who enjoy WFH and get remote jobs probably don't have the issues I've had, and that's okay too. But I think it's unrealistic to expect everyone joining a new company during this situation to be properly productive through it and potentially WFH indefinitely. For my company in particular they've already mentioned we'll get to WFH for this through the end of the year.
The utility of partial WFH is much, much lower than full WFH. With partial WFH I still have to live within reasonable commuting distance from the office, while if I’m full WFH I can leverage the difference in cost of living away from the office.
I would consider a much longer commute to be acceptable once or twice a week compared to having to do it every day. You could still have the benefit of having a lower cost of living without increasing the number of hours you spend commuting per week.
Talking to some of my team and coworkers the main thing I hear is they miss face to face interaction with the people they work with, and I do as well. I would like to see the 1 day a week "meeting day" but really try to focus on socializing than "this is the day we do all our meetings" since those seem to be working just as well with video conference. Maybe restrict it to things like 1:1s and group discussions.
Having a 1 day a week office would I think help people move away from high cost areas. If I only had to do it once a week a multi-hour or even flying to the office once a week wouldn't be bad (assuming that we return to our previous status quo with air travel.)
I've done this in the past - I live in Portland, and worked with a firm in Mount Vernon, WA, which is about three and a half hours north, one way. I didn't go in every week, more like a few days a month staying in a hotel, but I found it very agreeable. I quite enjoyed having a few days to collaborate intensively and then private time to finish the detail work.
That said, I'm notably introverted and happy as a clam during quarantine, more or less, so I'm probably not representative of the country as a whole. Of people currently working remote, I think we'll see about 20% of people who won't want to go back into offices. For my own selfish purposes I'm really hoping for a paradigm shift towards more remote work, but I accept it doesn't work well for some people.
Are you kidding? Traveling economically by air is one of the worst travel experiences you can have. If you're going to do it weekly, then it needs to be relatively cheap to make it worthwhile. Don't forget, too, that if this does become the norm, companies will start decreasing comp to make up for not having to pay people to live in high CoL areas. In terms of comfort, I'd rather stand on a BART train than fly for an hour.
I don't think flying weekly to an office scales up as well as you think it might.
> people WFH 3 or 4 days a week with one day of the week being designated as a "meeting day" where everyone is in the office.
I sort of had this setup before covid: the company I work for does consulting and my coworkers and I will often be at client's offices. When we write our contracts we make sure to always designate Friday as the day where all employees come back to the 'home base' for meetings, catch-ups, socializing, etc. It works quite well, and we'd always look forward to Friday's because of it.
If I could continue to WFH 3-4 days a week and then go into the office on Thursday/Friday, that would be great.
I work for another pretty well-known company and management just asked us how we were feeling about a future were we could chose to have a designated desk in the office or not. This is crazy, our wildest dreams are being answered.
I quit a great job to work remotely 4 months ago after about 15 years of trying to do it. I feel like the universe is having an absolute riot at my expense right now. This is not a fun time to be new at a company. It's so hard to focus and sip the koolaid when the world feels like it's falling apart outside of my skype meetings and facing customers and selling products is the last thing I'm energized to do.
I think some of the replies here are misguided, I've interviewed (and turned down offers from) some well-known companies who were doing remote work and renting office space for face to face meetings 1 day a week while they were constructing a new office in my city.
Before COVID I lived this, and it's really the best of both worlds. You have one day a week where you meet with your coworkers and demo stuff, talk about stuff, grab some good food in the city, grab a smoke outside, ride the train. It's a nice "day off" as-in out of the ordinary.
Typically the company will then reassess the office capacity needed to provide enough flexible space and accommodate all teams and their needs. But there's plenty of time to do that, since you cannot break (or not renew) a corporate lease overnight.
Then why pay $200k for a software engineer in the valley when the same talent can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1/3rd of the salary? The question I have is what portion of the $200k salary is 1) due to the raw talent of the individual 2) because they live in the bay area.
> when the same talent can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1/3rd of the salary
What makes you think this is true and not just a post-hoc rationalization? Let me put it this way: offer that salary worldwide and you will still have difficulty finding top-tier talent, as many remote-first companies are finding out the hard way. Having been a hiring manager in such a position before, I will tell you that you are still competing against every other remote tech company to find and hire from the same global talent pool.
Secondly, you're not accounting for communication ease and timezone differences. A huge amount of the world is cut out if you optimize for remote candidates within +-1-3 TZs.
Finally, the assertion that the average valley firm doesn't need a $200k+ in 2020 USD terms engineer is also not necessarily true. Demand for senior talent is significantly higher than for mid range and junior talent, because mid-large size firms want it (to bolster their senior roster and make it easier for teams to subdivide), and small firms absolutely need it (they simply do not have a senior engineer and need at least one).
The current gig I've got, if they'd had a senior engineer - even as an advisor - from the outset, basically the last ~8 mo of work split between myself and a different senior engineer would have been unnecessary.
I wasn’t asserting or claiming one way or the other. I’m asking the question. Your response assumes some stance I might have - I don’t. I found your response pretty unpleasant and combative even though there is truth in what you’re saying.
Isn't this a win-win-win though? Salaries become more normalized across the country so people can work from where they choose, SF rents will go down as techies start streaming out of the Bay Area, hiring pools for companies become inclusive of people who don't want to move to the Bay Area (or the other 2-3 tech cities).
The rest of the country also certainly doesn't pay 1/3rd of your salary.
Will people start streaming out of the Bay Area, though? The thing that always interested me about the Bay Area was that my friends in Mountain View would be posting long bike rides throughout the winter. Where it's snowy and below freezing in New York, it's 55 degrees and sunny there. I imagine people like that a lot, and is part of the reason it's a popular place to live.
There are other places in the US that are warm in the winter, of course, but less of them are also nice in the summer. Then among those, very few of them match the Bay Area in friendliness to things like LGBT causes.
I have a feeling that many people will continue gravitating to the Bay Area.
I wfh and I won't work for a company that bases my pay on my zipcode (Gitlab). I want complete flexibility on where I live. There are plenty of remote companies that don't do that, especially now post-covid.
I wish more people would reject zip code COL so that companies starting to WFH don't just take Gitlabs idea of it.
I'm with you. GitLab would be near the top of my employer targets if not for their bizarre location-based salaries. I want a remote-work job in large part so that I can move around. I relocate every 2-3 years, all over the US and internationally. If I get hired in the NYC area I'm not willing to take a 50% paycut because I want to spend a year living somewhere else.
Their calculations and reasoning are completely irrational. Rent is more a lot more in NYC, but utilities are the same; medical costs are the same; groceries are roughly the same (I found them cheaper in Manhattan than in nearby suburbs); you don't own a car (or two, as a couple); you don't have the expense of maintaining a large home and yard; etc. It costs a lot to live in NYC, but you can't compare the rent on a 1BR NYC apartment with a 1BR suburban apartment and say it's three times as expensive. It's a completely different lifestyle, and the choice for people like me is between a shoebox in the city with the perks of city life, or a comfortable 3BR home with a yard in the suburbs and a car and maybe a swimming pool or a boat or something. It's not a cheaper life, it's just a different life.
Is this a popular thing inside of gitlab? Personally, I'm conflicted: it's an interesting experiment, and I get where it comes from, but it's perhaps a bit too nearsighted.
In the end, I think zipcode (and COL) is a weak proxy for talent. It's very easy to measure zipcode, compared to talent.
But, think about it from the other angle: if you have a history of this talent (earning high salaries in high-COL zip codes or otherwise), why on earth would you accept anything less than that, when moving to a lower COL area?
To me, it seems like a decision that would hurt the employer more than help them, since the people with proven talent would work for companies that don't discriminate on zip codes. And that costs more than the investment in assessing incoming talent levels.
I work for places that pay me for what I'm worth, I don't work for places that pay me based on where I live.
I'm not cranking out code that is somehow less effective while living in the NW England, and so to pay me less than someone else is downright insulting.
I also, to be clear, don't have any hard feelings about people who live in even cheaper[0] places than me, it's their choice. I used to work with a guy in the Phillipines who was on the same as me. Good for him!
[0] It's not that cheap in the NW England. It's clearly not SF, NY or London, but it's not cheap.
How do I find a job that pays me top dollar independent of where I live? I'm a software engineer in a lower cost of living area of the US and I've considered moving to the bay area because wages stagnate here pretty early on in your career, and are generally far lower than in other areas of the world.
I've had a related thought: is it ethical to pay a person less based purely on where they live? I understand that there are different cost of living factors for different places, but that's on the employee's side and should be none of the employer's business. If they employer can pay $200k/yr for a remote employee, it shouldn't matter where they live, and so scaling that value seems discriminatory to me.
The US Government, normally a very conservative org, has cost of living increases for federal workers and (I think) military service members. Based on that, I think it's pretty well accepted (perhaps incorrectly!) that it is ethical.
What if we took that thinking and turned it around:
The minimum wage for a McDonalds cashier in NYC is $15/hour.
McDonalds also operates in India, and hires cashiers that do essentially the same work. If the employe was able to pay $15/hour for the same type of work in NYC, then shouldn't they pay the Indian cashier INR 1,125 / hour? Or what about the other way around, why shouldn't the NYC cashier get paid at the Indian cost-of-living?
And forget wages, how about the cost of goods and services? A 4BR house in Columbus, OH can cost about $300,000 — but the same house might cost about $3M in Palo Alto. Is this unfair / discriminatory? The house itself might be identical.
Just playing devils advocate: is it ethical to pay someone SF salary despite them living in a third world country where they are essentially richer than kings and can wreak havoc on the economy/culture if they themselves aren't ethical (paying off government, etc).
Salary is not a number, its a "standard of living". But paying two engineers in two different zip codes the same number, you are technically paying the person in the cheaper location more. They have a much higher "standard of living".
> is it ethical to pay a person less based purely on where they live?
It's not just rent/mortgage price differences, there are also different laws regarding taxation, healthcare and retirement.
On the other hand you can't offer someone in the Bay Area a Eastern Europe level salary. Nobody would come, but you can offer a slightly higher than average salary in E.E. and they would definitely come. It's just that a global company needs to hire in both regions to be competitive.
Definitely an interesting point. What happens when you are remote in one expensive city then move to a cheaper city? Does the employer need to know where you presently reside? I would think not.
the pay is based (as it should be) on market conditions, regulations and contractual obligations. Should not be based on ethics - those can vary in surprising ways.
Looking at the disparity of incomes of tech workers across regions, makes it abundantly clear that wages would be 50% lower if they could hire anywhere in the country, and probably 80% lower if they could hire anywhere in the world.
We've all worked with highly qualified offshore resources (as well as many bad ones). Do they really deserve that 20k salary when we're making high six figures?
I've started hiring abroad. It's a different form of management, sure, but you absolutely beat the return on investment.
My advice is to try to stick with the same timezone, and the same language (or roughly anyway).
> Then why pay $200k for a software engineer in the valley when the same talent can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1/3rd of the salary
That is a pretty ridiculous assertion. Rent and taxes are higher but they are not $130k/year higher.
You can even save >$70k of the $200k you make in the bay area without being exceptionally frugal, which you obviously can't do if you're making $70k/year.
If i can work remote at facebook for 200k or work remote at google for 210k who would I pick? Salaries I expect would dip slightly as the pool of engineers grows then go back up as it gets more competitive. Salaries would only go down if the supply of jobs goes down. I don't think that happens in the short term.
Regarding raw talent, didn't Google, Apple, etc. form a cartel a while back to suppress the wages of engineers? I highly doubt wages are tightly bound to value output.
In my own experience throughout my career I've been both severely overpaid and underpaid relative to my economic impact.
Bingo! I often talk about how you can rent a 3BR apartment in my home town (Nowhere, Michigan) for like $900. This is true -- I've verified it recently. The drawback is that you have to live in my home town.
I can certainly see companies wanting to pay less based on CoL simply to make the bottom line better. Given the way capitalism works, I'd say this is a near inevitability. The end result will probably be that the big tech companies are going to start "offshoring" work to the Midwest, and other low to very low cost of living areas. ("We'll pay you $70k per year, but you can live wherever you want in the US!")
I can't see this being good for employees, because there are significant benefits to living in a place like NYC or the Bay Area, and those benefits would be lost if people had to live in the middle of nowhere to make it worthwhile.
If the scenario you're describing happens, some startups will appear and pay SWEs 160k/year to live wherever they want, and the good engineers will leave to work at those startups.
The fundamental problem (for the cost-cutting employer) is that good engineering orgs really do generate that much value.
This happened with the wage-collusion attempts in the valley. Facebook was willing to give more raises than Google or Apple. In the latest roll of the dice, AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, and friensd were willing to pay more. It's the cycle of business.
I’ve worked from home for a number of years. It’s all about having a normal schedule. My family knows when I’m in the office, I am at work. There isn’t anyone popping over my shoulder, and general interruptions are almost nil in my case.
I think a lot of people are going to be super surprised what a quiet room and your playlist of choice can do to increase productivity. Just my 2 cents.
I've been working from home for about 16 months, and I'm afraid my partner doesn't quite get what a different head space I am in when I'm working, when she comes for a friendly visit if she isn't busy herself. I can seem cold and even abrupt, sometimes, when she comes to see me. But it takes so long to get in that space, it is hard to be brought out of it.
Ironic thing is, she also works from home about 80-90% of the time. Guess she inhabits that mind-set more easily than I do!
This is the biggest issue for me. Work puts me into a very different mindset(i.e. an asshole) and without obvious signs of when I am or am not working my wife doesn't know how to interact with me.
That’s really difficult in the beginning. Like others have said, boundaries are awesome. One thing I did that helped a lot is simply asking if I’d pop into their work to sit and ask a few questions. The answer has always been no. So I ask that they not do that when I’m at work either.
> There isn’t anyone popping over my shoulder, and general interruptions are almost nil in my case.
I think a lot of people are going to be super surprised what a quiet room and your playlist of choice can do to increase productivity. Just my 2 cents.
It's the same for me – at home, and the opposite at the office. I live alone.
Yeah, I think many people don't realize that working from home during a pandemic is not a normal work from home experience. Normally, that someone popping over your shoulder would be at work, school, day care or otherwise outside playing during most of the working day. A lot of people working from home today are responsible for a lot more than their work, which is distracting in and of itself.
Outside of all that, it comes down to self-discipline.
this is exactly the reason I prefer the office .. I have 2 kids, 5 & 2, and if I'm home they are very much used to me being around them or doing something together, working from home is not ideal
My son is 5 and he knows what my door is for. He still comes in occasionally but it's pretty manageable. The 2 year old is a different matter, but soon we'll get daycares back so no biggie.
Before this, I was just not able to work at home. I was always distracted and would only get a half day of work in at best. But finally had to actually buckle down and set up my desk. And set boundaries for interruptions. I could really use an actual KVM, but otherwise working from home is finally nice for me.
A normal schedule helps, but there are a number of other things which need to align in order for it to work. I'm guessing you have those things and take them for granted or you would have listed them.
A proper work environment is key, including limiting distractions and proper ergonomics. You also need co-habitants which respect and understand the boundaries and work rules. It really helps to have a house. I live in an apartment and can't control the distractions(literally as I hit 'reply' someone started a power saw in the garage below my office).
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I feel very bad for my kids as all they want is to be able to play with their friends and do all the things they could before so I do my very best to not show them my frustration. Its a depressing situation all around but I am very grateful to actually still have a job while so many others have lost theirs. My kids ask me why I have to work so much all the time, as all they want to do is spend time with me.
I guess what I am trying to say is the current situation is not optimal.
I suspect it's unusual that my boss actually said that out loud, but I hope everyone is thinking it. This is a temporary situation none of us planned for, and it ought to be reasonable and expected to lower your standards until schools and childcare are around again.
Having work and home contexts now collapsed into single environment has had the surprising effect where each interaction with the family during my work day triggers the subconscious thought of whether I just made a tradeoff between work and home -- and if so, was it the right one. In isolation the amount of energy each thought takes is negligible, but add up each interaction throughout the day, and day after day, it's been incredibly draining.
I dunno, my thoughts change daily on this topic. But this is my venting of for whatever day it is. usually I type these replies and never submit, but cathartic, if nothing else, to vent and post this one today.
p.s. agree, while not optional, still incredibly grateful to still have a job.
The other problem is the confusion of what day it is and that since I got not much work done during the weekdays I also work at the weekend, which before was a complete no-no. Over the long term, this lack of time off for them and me probably is not good.
I haven't figured out how to be as productive as night as I would be in the morning, which used to be my best hours.
I think it is time for a lot of people for a relocation to somewhere with better-larger living arrangements, and better access to childcare (private or public).
And it also should give rise to gig economy around private tutors/babysitters/nannys - which is very useful, and actually could be fun for a lot of people.
I for one expect lower productivity from my staff whether or not they have kids, and am adjusting delivery dates to account for this.
Are you young, single, and live in an apartment? I have noticed a divide along those lines with WFH. As an older, married person, living in a house with a yard, I haven't worked in an office for any length of time for last 10 years.
None of my close friends are related to work. I like having lunch with my wife and going out back with the dogs when I need a break. I also have an actual office with a door in my house. The time I save commuting means there is more time to workout and cook healthy meals every day. And, if I really want to 'get out' the local coffee shop is 5 minutes away. The owner and her 2 employees are awesome along with great coffee and great internet.
Of course I may think differently if I was back in my 600 sqft apartment and single with few friends.
... the list goes on and on.
It is not surprising that you will have every variation of the above. But my guess is that for the majority of the people, once they setup a proper home office, the would likely find working from home to be somewhere in the "mildly positive" to "really positive" side of things. Even if some disagree with that, at the very least, I imagine that most would agree that they would like to have the _option_ to work from home whenever they choose.
You have the life I want.
Not parent comment, but yes.
However, I do have friends outside of work. Obviously right now I'm rarely if ever seeing them, and certainly not all. Very occasionally we decide on a small coffee shop to go support at the same time and talk from a couple car spaces away for a few minutes just to engage in some kind of social behavior. It helps momentarily, but not consistently.
Going to work and making friends there, while not "IRL" friends, really helps work become a more fluid environment where you don't need to stress out all the time on structure. It gives breathing room. Some jokes lighten the mood. I personally feel like it's easier to discuss important topics when I have "friends" on my team or other teams who have a respect for my train of thought.
Also, while I do have a desk and monitor now, I work in the same room as my entertainment space (living room). So I'm literally in the same room all day. And no, I don't want to setup a workspace in my bedroom, that'd be even worse.
If I had a dedicated office room that'd be nice. If I had a more normal house where I had space to walk between areas like the kitchen, dining room/area, living room that would help.
But I do not.
I'm optimistic about a "work wherever works for you" future. That might mean the company's office, or your home office, or your living room couch, or a coworking space, or a beach, or your parents' house, or a friend's place. It might mean all of those at different times. The current situation has made it clear that remote work is pretty viable, but it's destroyed the element of choice that is so important to mental health for many people.
I, on the other hand, get a lot more focus time here, at home, than in the office. Every little 'ding' sound, every little 'hey, when did you get home last night' conversation, every time someone turns on or off the lights, all of that and much more just rips me out of my concentration.
I've been able to focus _a lot_ more from home. It's good for me to realize this as well.
Feel free to stay in the office when you're finally able to, and I'll work towards staying at home, if I'm able to. That way, we're both happy.
Do you perhaps live alone in a small apartment? I can see how working from home could be tough on a situation like that. I live with my family, in a house, with a garden, and I absolute abhor the idea of resuming a daily commute. I hate our office, and I love my home.
I am definitely no “social butterfly”, though.
I've seen some people predict that a surge in home buying may follow the pandemic because people will realize how much better off they would have been in a larger space.
I will go ahead and move into a 2 bedroom in the next few months to allow me to have a more private office space.
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Remote work takes all of it away and adds this invisible burden to navigate through your teams thought process. That alone is a huge factor for me to make sure there is a balance between remote work and office visits.
Since I had no options to work in an office - I didn't have one - I decided to start working in a co-working space.
The co-working space cost me money I would otherwise not have spent but the impact on my mental health was great. I got a regular group of "colleagues" and it clearly divided my home life and work life.
I would definitely recommend it once we're all out of lockdown.
I would be cautious about overfitting too much to this exact scenario though. Normally even if you were working from home, you could still have a very active social life, get lunch with nearby friends who also work from home, do activities after work, go out on the weekends, etc. I know people that are extroverted and have really enjoyed working from home.
And even if it's really not for you, as other comments have pointed out, there will still certainly be co-located workplaces in the future. Even if almost every company were to go remote, you're definitely not the only one that likes being around other people and I'm sure companies will accomodate this (whether it's a small optional company office, or paying for employees to use a co-working space like a We Work, etc.)
In sum, the social aspect really is the worst part of engineering in Silicon Valley, and I have half a mind to do something on my own so I no longer have to entertain mediocre engineers with terrible interests.
So, I would love to work for a place that was fully remote. It would be paradise to me.
Part of the reason this happens is because every task is estimated and timed. Over time the estimates have become fairly accurate so you can't get away with dossing the whole day.
But with the whole office working remotely, virtual hang out sessions, asynchronous communications, everyone joining remotely for office updates etc etc. I hate to admit it but I quite enjoy it now. I feel more productive. If a company sets up the right culture for remote work, it's not that bad.
Remote work means you can work wherever you want, you can go to a coffee shop for a few hours, you can head to your town’s local library, a coworking space. You can take an extended trip and live out of a van.
Once starlink is up, if you can get away with high latency, you can work from the middle of Greenland if you wanted to.
Working from home, which is really working from wherever you want, is about the flexibility and control to work how, when and where you want.
I do hope that large tech companies like twitter leave their offices open, because that’s also a piece of the remote work puzzle. Just like when we switched from cubicles to open offices, it would be nice to be more thoughtful about remote work AND an in office hybrid situation.
Off topic but, the latency will be better than cable. They're low altitude satellites. There was even talk of using Starlink for New York / London HFT, because signals travel faster in space than they do in fiber optic (some fraction of the speed of light).
It sounds as if you are like one of my sons.
I miss the "buzz" of human interaction that TV in the background never gives, but I can usually get that from Starbucks.
I'm an introvert, and I've been doing independent consulting over the phone for clients for, gosh, 7-or-so years now, and I love talking to my clients, but I don't want to be in the office with them.
One of my sons is about to go bat-shit crazy. The other loves his ability to get tasks in the morning and focus.
I guess we are all wired different.
I was in the process of putting together a "Remote First" business plan, for my next venture, where -- there simply was no home office.
But reading comments like yours really brings home how bad an idea that might be, because I'd be losing out on incredible talent by doing so.
BTW: My current main client has an office (mostly shut down), but I've made it a point to take out a different engineer for lunch (of something similar, depending on the lockdown harshness), 3 times a week (we're small, so I tend to take out everybody for lunch, including my boss) about every six weeks. That's not enough ... but it's the little things that make you feel connected, right? We had a young (28 y.o.?) superstar that was about to lose his shorts release week about two weeks ago and simply bringing to my place with pizze and Netflix and Nintendo (we got shitfaced and he beat my ass at Super Mario Cart), it was good. He felt better, I felt better, nobody got laid, and we both woke up refreshed...
I think you have a solid point that people need people. But, my question is: Can this be done virtually?
I'm a USian, but I lived in Japan for over 10 years, and my mother always wanted to see me, but I never understood why, when I could read her voice better over the phone than in person. She wanted to see me because she could read my body language better in person than over the phone (which I did not like, actually), but is there a way via which you can feel connected without being in the same room? My girlfriend (I live in Texas) is in Taiwan and we have pretty engaging conversations every day and she comes to see me (or vice versa) about 10 times/year. Would that kind of work satisfy you, or do you literally need to see people every day? (As an introvert, I guess I don't know how extraverts work).
Anyway - A bit more disclosure than I usually do - but I am sincerely interested in your perspective.
- I chose a co-working space that was more aligned to the type of person I am in terms of the people there, style, philosophy, etc.
- I've met a lot of people from outside my industry which I quite enjoy.
- I get to socialize with people I don't work with, so conversations are not about work gossip which is also great.
- There's tons of activities organised in the space. Work/career talks, informal art talks, hikes, beer fridays, concerts, food sharing, etc.
- It's a 5min walk from my house.
Of course, this is all covid-pending.
WFH without a choice to come to office is pure suffering. I really miss the interactions with my coworkers before COVID. I also miss time I can grab a book from the shared book-self and find an empty office and just do reading for one hour.
If I have a choice to go back to office, I will take it anytime.
I've been working from home for about 2 years, a legacy consequence of a few acquisitions. Despite its perks, I don't think that I would've stayed with it past the first year if not for 1) a local set of friends that I could still take breaks / lunches with 2) going to the corporate office once a month for about a week which allowed me to form a nice social network in the mothership city.
But covid-19 stopped both, and I'm stuck with this ennui that's been hard to shake.
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I'm worried that mixing my work and personal life too much will be a big strain on my mental health, but I plan to work at home as little as possible in the future, while still trying to work remote to avoid having to commute and enjoy a more flexible schedule. I hope this idea will help you!
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I ranted about this today [1]. For many the separation of home and office is healthy. Different people, different social interactions, etc.
And for many, an office is where they make new friends, meet their partner etc.
[1] https://twitter.com/flurdy/status/1260602214038593536
I think the best case (for me personally) is both... 2-3 days per week from the office, and 3-2 days from home. You talk with people, socialize, hear all the gossip (from non-work related, to work related - eg. aout someone who's working on some interesting new project, etc.), but still don't have to drive to work 3 times a week, and can work in your underwear.
I still have some friends at work, but to be honest: I never really did well with random people, usually those that I consider friends I chose since we have similar interests/vibe/philosophy.
I'm also a very social person, but my non-work time is my social outlet (though I still get some "lower-quality" social time over Slack and Zoom during work hours). When the company was smaller (a couple hundred people, now we're over 3k), I certainly spent more social time at the office. But these days I prefer to just work hard during work hours, and meet up with friends (who are often also co-workers) after work.
But at the same time, I love that working at home gives me the flexibility to cook lunch with my girlfriend or take a break for a walk or even just stare out the window in the middle of the afternoon. While my commute isn't bad (25 min transit ride or 45 min walk), I don't mind getting that time back, either. Instead I can get up and go for a 30 minute run, and start work at the same time.
So the COVID rules have left me in roughly the same situation as I was before, at least work-wise (I miss seeing my friends like crazy). Fortunately I don't have kids; nearly everyone I know with kids is finding it impossible to juggle them being home all the time with getting their work done.
It's really interesting though to see how this sort of thing affects people differently (and I'm genuinely sorry you're having such a bad time!). I expect the incidence of work-from-home will increase a lot even after we've stopped social distancing, but there will still be a strong (but newly-flexible) office culture.
But with FOMA out of the way - I'm happy as larry staying in and having those same conversations selectively and remotely.
I invite you now to consider that a much milder version of these is what introverts deal with almost all the time due to the norms of society (which are biased toward social butterflies). We have to learn to overcome and adapt to these difficulties early in life, and for some of us that struggle is real (and life-long).
I hated daily standups, where every morning we have to justify our existence and repeat what's already on the Jira board to some product manager who for whatever reason isn't obliged to give us their status update. I hated all the other numerous pointless agile meetings - backlog refinement, backlog grooming (once got accused of not appearing attentive enough in meetings). I hate open offices, where you have no privacy, have to listen to other peoples' conversations, and constantly feel like you're being watched and paranoid that somebody might catch a glance at your monitor the second you took a 5 minute break from work. I hate having to be surrounded by boring co-workers with no personality all day, in offices where most people eat alone at their desks in front of their computer screens (I never understood this, are people actually working when they eat in front of their computer monitors? You're sitting there for 8 hours and you're so busy you can't take 30 minutes to eat your lunch without being glued to the screen?)
I've been working remotely since last year and I am significantly happier. 98% of that "office bullsh!t" vanished overnight. No commuting. No daily standups. Less pointless meetings (it's like remote workers don't need meetings to bullsh!t meetings to rationalize being stuck in an office for 8 hours). I've traveled the world. At ~$200k/yr I make less than I would in SF, but it's a very comfortable living practically anywhere else in the world since my expenses are a fraction what they were before, and I don't need to be locked in to a lease. When it's 2pm and I'm not feeling productive, I just close my laptop and do something else (instead of trying to figure out how to blow the next 3 hours at the office). When I need to go to the grocery store or gym, I go. If I want to spend a month in Hawaii, I do it.
Remote work certainly has its challenges - you need to be disciplined, have a comfortable workspace ideally separate from your home so you're not stuck in the same place all day (I like coffee shops), do other activities that get you outside the harm (a little more difficult now with COVID), you can't just walk over to someone's desk so people need to be available (not necessarily on a second's notice, but within some acceptable range such that time isn't wasted being blocked), and you have to know when to turn off and go offline. You can't rely on co-workers for your social life anymore, though I don't think I ever had more than 2-3 real friends at any office job in terms of anyone I still keep in contact with.
So it's funny to me seeing occasional comments on remote work posts talking about how much they like working in an office. Personally offices have always been the bane of my existence, and there are few thoughts more repulsing then being trapped in some office for 8 hours/day. To be fair I once worked out of the office of a company I was working remotely for and really enjoyed it because it was a tiny startup with cool people who didn't care when or what time I showed up since I had been hired on purely remote terms and was only at the office voluntarily. So the problem is not the office itself, but the idea of being locked inside for designated hours, and the other bullsh!t management practices generally prevalent in office jobs especially at bigger companies.
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It sounds like there is a choice so hopefully this is a temporary situation for you.
I expect other tech giants will follow suit.
Those who previously can't afford or don't want to live in big cities like NYC/Seattle/SF because they are older, have families, or various other reasons now are included in the candidate pool.
This can go two ways: either the local software business will have to compete with FAANG salaries, or there will be jumps from senior developers, experienced developers, and many smarter/more capable developers from smaller software business to FAANG due to salary/perks attraction. Whatever the case is, suddenly fresh graduates, mid level developers, senior developers, are now competing on the same pool. It is getting even more real to compete in the high FAANG salary job openings now.
This serves as a reminder for us, whether fresh graduates, mid level, or even seniors, to always to keep your edge. DS&A grinding, system design, etc, do whatever you can to not lose your edge.
As a matter of fact, I think almost all knowledge workers will find themselves in this situation. If you are a knowledge/office worker, huge competition looms over the horizon. Never lose your edge.
If anything, if the twitter trend follows, FAANG salaries will lose heat. For the majority of the employees, a good chunk of the paycheck goes to housing costs. Wider WFH adoption will ease the overly localized housing demand, even with several days of WFO, longer commutes will be much more tolerable and the housing spread will increase. That would mean acceptance of lower salaries and lowering of housing costs over time.
One competing factor; as the seniority increases, the say on WFH policies increases, also the possibility of housing ownership increases (whether as primary residence or also with rental properties). That creates a perverse incentive to not let people go away in aggregate. Not saying individual managers will think this way explicitly, but might have an indirect influence.
Edit:
- Previously I stated 22k as H1B + green card numbers. In reality 22k was H1B only and 6k was green card. Source: https://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Google/225093.htm
I went studied CS in Idaho and know many of my peers took significantly lower paying jobs than they are qualified for so they could remain in the area. I'm certain at least some of them would rather work for larger companies with higher salaries and better benefits (and more prestige), if it didn't mean moving into the BIG CITY and leaving their friends/family behind.
In reality, it's probably a mix of both.
Is your employer really going to decrease your salary after the fact? Can you file taxes in your lower cost of living state after you lock in your high SF comp package and never notify your employer but still pay your taxes in the state you moved back to?
Note: I don't condone illegal behavior just thinking of edge cases that benefit us tech workers.
I do agree that this expectation that one sitting in Ohio will command the same salary working for a FAANG company is just wrong. Very likely, the companies will adjust their salaries based on where the person is.
This is really only true for certain segments of the population. In my early to mid 20s, I moved cross country numerous times. Now I hope I never have to move again. And if I did, it wouldn't be to the Bay Area or Seattle.
So I'm not sure your statement that "more than half of new employers[sic] are supplied internationally" is true, because the H-1B numbers include renewals.
It turns out to be fairly difficult to recruit engineering talent in the United States outside of major metropolitan areas. It also turns out that when tech companies start to hire people in a new city, the cost of living in that city rises substantially -- again, Austin in particular comes to mind.
In the end, if tech compensation decreases substantially I don't think it will be because of remote work, but rather because the recession will kill a lot of startups and the same amount of engineering talent will be chasing a smaller number of jobs, thereby giving employers more leverage.
That is inevitable if more housing is not built. If demand rises and supply doesn’t, or rises slower than demand rents and house prices rise. Or you could be like Tokyo with population growing 50% over the last twenty years and flat housing costs.
If a company starts a new office in Austin and they had one in the bay, now they are realistically only tapping the additional talent in Austin. There isn’t a huge chunk of people willing to relocate to Austin that wouldn’t relocate to the bay.
Removing location restrictions all-together is a completely different ballgame because it opens the entire country up, not just one city.
To put it another way, do you currently see pay adjustments based on housing costs for employees living in SF? Have you ever heard of differences across employees simply because one of them has a more expensive house?
I am voluntarily transferring from Google SF to Google London and I am taking a significant salary cut. London isn't really any cheaper to live in, but you can hire good developers for much less in Europe.
I live and work out of St. Louis at the moment, and I've spent a bit of time evaluating FAANG salaries in relation to the cost of living in their relevant areas. While in most cases it seemed I could maybe get 1.5x to 2x my St. Louis salary, I was looking at around a 5x increase in housing costs alone. It never made any sort of financial sense to make the move (as much as I would've liked to).
Of course the most sensible approach would be to offer just above market rate in whatever the local market is. That can be awfully hard to determine though. It's much more a function of local supply and demand than anything that correlates to cost of living.
They said local companies will have to compete with FANG salaries. To your point these would likely be cost of living adjusted, but would almost certainly be higher than the current average in most Midwestern cities.
Is your employer really going to decrease your salary after the fact? Can you file taxes in your lower cost of living state after you lock in your high SF comp package and never notify your employer but still pay your taxes in the state you moved back to?
Note: I don't condone illegal behavior just thinking of edge cases that benefit us tech workers.
If COVID-19 really helped people to work from the Ouachitas at reasonable salaries, it would be completely awesome. But we're a long way from that. I love remote work and would like to see more people do it. But the past history of epidemics (e.g., 1918, the 1665 London plague, etc.) indicates people will go back to previous behavior--favoring urban areas--once the crisis passes.
There are a lot of us out here in the middle who want that.
I get your skepticism, but I'm going to hope against hope that telepresence technology will continue to improve and make that possible.
Working remotely from another country is easy. Paying somebody in another country is not easy at all. Even with specialized providers it is a substantial hassle. Without it you pretty much better give up - the chances you get all the payments, taxes and paperwork right is minimal, and that country's tax/regulatory authorities would be more than happy to fine you and/or your workers if you don't. In the best case, in worse case they might just seize your money intended for payroll and keep it until you figure things out.
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I think if it's widespread it would be a little of both with some extra effects to consider. Not only will FAANG organizations get a wider pool of applicants which will drive down salaries for FAANG orgs, AND other businesses will how have to deal with the fact that their technology workers are part of a much larger market than they were previously, which will drive up salaries for those workers remotes, but there could be some very interesting delayed effects. How many FAANG workers now would opt to move farther away and keep their position, which will depress (that is, realign with reality to some small degree) the real estate market in areas like Seattle and San Francisco? What does that do to salaries later (likely a much smaller effect, but maybe non-negligible)?
Telecommuting has been hailed as one aspect of saving the suburban and rural life for a long time. Maybe we'll actually see some of it now.
What happens if there's a net reduction in people living in San Francisco and surrounds over 10 years, say 10%? I mean, it sounds unlikely, but so didthe idea of so many people staying inside for months at a time, and everyone switching to telecommuting so fast. All these things are related, and with major changes in one, relatively rapid change in things that related to it can be expected. At this point I'm actually thinking it's possible we could shift to UBI of some sort, and just a few months ago I didn't see any way that could happen without a major economic disruption, but hey, we've already got that.
For now, most big companies have enough cash and are primarily focusing on making sure workers are not going crazy rather than on turning out new software. Give it another 3-4 months though and those companies will have to pivot back to real development which may be harder than they expect if WFH is still practiced en masse. My 2c.
"Never lose your edge."
How about, enjoy your free time. Enjoy your friends and family. Work hard at your job, but maintain the division.
This hyper-productivity porn is a net negative. There is competition in this industry, but nowhere near enough to leave talented engineers fearing for anything. Not on a near time-horizon, at least.
The employee's local cost-of-living will factor into the comp.
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- Some anti-WFH person, probably
There are downsides to working from home, it's silly to dismiss them as mindlessness from the other camp.
To make this work I wonder how executives will adapt. In my company the higher you go up the chain, the more they want face to face communication. I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes away an important skill set of theirs.
That's coming from personal experience btw, where most jobs / assignments I've had, it was usually open plan, flexible seat arrangements.
I have a new job now where I have a fixed desk with a set of drawers. It's a breath of fresh air and honestly it sounds so stupid and trivial. But employers don't have their employees' best interest in mind.
My cynical take on this move is that the company doesn't have to pay as much for office space + worker transport anymore.
Open office plans, low cubicle walls, cubicle sharing, frequent noise and disrespect of focus, flimsy banged up office chairs and equipment, no budget for standing desks, the lack of real employee lounges and couches to both work and chill out at, strict clocking in and out, and insufficient meeting space are chasing away good employees, especially now that we're all forced to work remotely. More people won't be willing to go back if they can help it.
Notice I mentioned nothing about free snacks, foosball tables, beer on tap, etc. I'd trade all of that for some semblance of serenity in the office.
Don't forget it removes the work/home barrier. Now you are at work 24/7 and on call at all hours. Work and productivity has consumed most of modern life. The last bastion of freedom from work/productivity was the home. Now people are celebrating the loss of that precious personal space. Strange.
It's on the product side that things are tougher. Great product work is often about finding meaningful insights in the data available to you, and that often involves long conversations between people with lots of different viewpoints. There's something about doing that in person that is just really hard to replicate remotely.
Even getting the environment exactly right only goes so far. I find that over Zoom people are just a little bit less engaged and that means getting to those really important insights takes a lot longer.
Previous to covid we had solved this by colocating our product team and then bringing the engineering team together once a quarter with product folks to engage them in those conversations. Now we're just sort of feeling our way though it...
And now that they are at home, they are not trying as hard to pretend they are listening closely, and since they are more comfortable, they are staying in the meetings and saying what they want? Whereas before they would let the most assertive person talk, and after a few minutes could not tolerate the in person meeting anymore and so pretended that they were all in agreement so you would let them go, knowing they would work out the actual details amongst themselves later?
And now they don't have the option of working things out after the meeting, which is another reason the meetings are taking longer.
The biggest issue for you is probably that you have a lot of wasted time where only a part of the team is working together in the meeting but other people who are not involved in that part are just waiting for them to finish.
Do some research on the tools that engineers use to work asynchronously and train your product team. Also consider smaller video chat meetings, and chat rooms, etc.
Product and Design so far doesn't seems work well without close face to face collaboration.
Infrastructure: Do homes have chargers, desks, screens? If not people will soon get carpal tunnel or lose productivity.
Internet/VPN security costs are real.
Productivity creep : Some of the main issues with WFH have been work hour creep. Managers and other employees feel its easier to make requests for more time given that you are now a few feet from your laptop. Lack of discipline also means that people now work longer.
Rewards and promotions I can't find it right now, but I recall WFH resulting in lower pay relative to people with the same qualifications who went to office.
Mental costs: One of the main issues with WFH has been loneliness. Fixing this requires immense effort to recreate physical proximity.
Creativity is also lost when you cant engage in banter and catching up with people.
This might also be a trust thing. Studies have found that in-person social interaction leads to increased levels of trust among the group, but remote social interaction doesn't have this affect. The higher you go up the management chain, the more trust is required to perform your job effectively. ICs usually work under well-defined, measurable conditions: you can determine from their work product whether an engineer, salesperson, or designer is being productive. Executives do not work under these conditions, and arguably the job of an executive is to define those metrics. To get everyone rowing in the same direction requires an immense amount of trust and collaboration amongst the high-level leadership of the company, and it seems like it'd be challenging to achieve that virtually.
There are so many positions at Microsoft, for example, that I would have loved to apply for, but they require you to be in Redmond, and I'm just not in a position to relocate.
I started working in one team and switched to another team internally because they are pro-remote and I plan on moving back to Australia. Broadly across Microsoft there are also about ~30 other engineers already working from Australia for Redmond-based teams.
Most managers especially at the top are also not the most diligent people, they have employees to do the stuff that they dislike doing so when they are faced with having to do more prep work and move at what they consider a slower speed (they are wrong, all that prep work and due diligence pays off, Bezos and Amazon are a great example of that) they recoil.
I think the biggest use case will be helping recreate the virtual water cooler.
(I WFH exclusively for 10+ years and still regularly miss the office for anything which isn't deep down coding, but requires communication)
Also webcam images generally look horrible. I am sure something could be done about that.
Better microphones and speakers in laptops would help. Better suppression of background noises like kids would help.
I think there are a lot of little things that could improve tools a lot.
Not everyone wants to be remote, where I work they asked for volunteers for the first wave and had to turn people down for some groups. For these the separation of work and home is line they don't like to cross.
I dont think that is hard to replicate. Group chat / slack / teams is a common feature and can easily be used to fill this void.
Working on a UI and server for just that. Plug an API key for a cloud provider into the UI which will help users move data from their laptop to a private bucket for example, or spinup basic infra, enable sharing with other users accounts for opt-in data collection
Sell or donate access to specific data in your account on your terms.
The web is dead. With the right tools anyone can leverage the cloud to regain a ton of privacy and control of their data. Maybe we can dismantle through free market effort, the technocracy middleman now that building such software is trivial
If you trust the privacy of cloud providers, you can spin up a server and use https://sandstorm.io/, which is designed around that: private infra, with granular sharing of data.
If you don't, you need local compute and encryption. Keybase would be a decent example - while you can't use your own cloud account, they only see encrypted data.
That said, there's a reason a lot of people deleted their Keybase accounts when they got acquired by Zoom. Data mining is very enticing, so outside of projects ran by idealist volunteers - which will always have a hard time competing with funded companies -, how do you keep developers from adding mining abilities even to the native/self-hosted applications?
You're also now competing against a national talent pool vs locals only
Make no mistake - work from home means the salaries are going to regress to the midwest level of pay.
I got covid and was (and still am) as sick as hell. I'm going to live (not sure if I will get back to 100% yet), and I never thought this kind of sorely needed decentralization would happen in my lifetime. It almost feels like a fair swap, as this is going to be so, so good for humanity. If we can get a decent handle on covid, I'm actually feeling optimistic for my children, for the first time in years.
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When I started as a developer, my team was fully remote (I was the only developer in NYC, most of the rest were in Portugal or elsewhere in the US.) I found it very difficult to ask questions remotely for several reasons: I never knew if I was intruding on somebody else's time, and explaining things over Slack isn't as effective (in retrospect, I should have made more use of video and voice chat). YMMV: some people are probably more bold in asking questions remotely. For newer developers, this is important.
You really can't overstate how useful it is to just plunk your laptop down in front of another developer and ask questions while staring at the same screen.
At my current company, I'm usually co-located with our other developer, which made the process of clarifying things for both of us a lot easier. As I've gained experience, I've found it a lot easier to ask questions remotely: we've made great use of various voice/video/screensharing functionality for this purpose.
And some of my staff can’t even do phone calls if their roommate has one at the same time because they have small apartments. I don’t even have that problem.
Not interested in providing rent-free space to my employer.
We can have a nice local life that flourishes, once the utterly stupid situation of having everyone converge at the same time on a fixed point is forever slain.
As an aside -- I prefer not to use the term "work from home", as the ideal (for me) is the ability to work from anywhere at my option.
Also, for what it's worth, co-working spaces can be a workable alternative to a traditional office.
One day that just comes to a hard stop. You're sitting in your childhood bedroom on a computer. Your friends have all scattered to the wind. What now?
Of course it's possible to build a life from scratch, without the benefit of an institutional attachment. You can enforce a schedule for yourself. You can go chat up strangers in bars or meetup groups or whatever, and build a social network that way. But it's not hard to see how this level of flexibility, so suddenly, could be suffocating.
Contrast with a mid-career professional who already has a spouse, a well-developed social network gathered from the many communities he's been part of over the years, and the structure/routine of childrearing.
Certainly, there are different clubs and groups out there, but the people they attract are fairly homogenous, and monofocused on their topic of interest. There are coffee-houses and bars, but you'd be lucky to interact with anyone there repeatedly in such a way as to form any durable social bond.
The only other quick option for gaining automatic access to a well-rounded social environment that I can think of is a church, but educated young people tend to enter the workforce with a contempt of organized religion that ranges from passive to visceral.
Of course the latter is more an issue of the pandemic right now than just remote work in principle but I have the sense that remote working also leads to less spontaneous interaction.
My home office in my small 2br city center apartment has a better monitor than the one at my open office workstation, I can listen to whatever music I want, no BS small talk, and I don't feel like there are eyes on me constantly. Plus, commuting sucks no matter where you live, most city dwellers don't live within walking distance of their offices.
I do like the opportunity to socialize w/ coworkers from time to time but 2-3 days/week in office is more than enough for me.
Obviously there is an exception right now, but normally "working from home" means you can work from anywhere you want (different country, parents cottage, coffee shop, outside, where ever).
I work for a tech company and we have people who regularly go to Europe/other places for months and work from there just getting up/working later depending on timezone.
Most people assume that working from home or working remotely means sitting at home at a desk and working the exact same as you would an office. In which case you lose the office communication. But that's wrong.
IME blended teams are by far the hardest to make work.
Imo, remote is a big perk once you have a couple of years of professional work under your belt, but a real challenge before that point.
Yes, and there is some correlation between age and seniority. If companies are so eager to hire senior developers, they might consider the preferences of candidates who have been working long enough to fit that description.
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1) I live in San Francisco. A ton of residents here commute to Mountain View and environs for work. A ton.
2) Most of those residents are young.
3) One of the few things that has been reliably proven to improve your happiness - even more than a salary bump! - is reducing your commute time.
4) With WFH (work from home) everyone who commutes from SF to elsewhere could cut their commute from 2 hrs round trip, daily, to 0.
5) Ergo, a ton of young people would quickly see the logic of this: WFH and cut your commute time to 0. They would want this option, and they will take it.
I know this complicated somewhat by the fact that you can work from the buses, but I still don't see the overcoming this widely shared preference, for no commute.
I have a fairly small 1BR. I don't really have a proper work environment set up--what's the point of cramming a desk in if I'm going into the office every day? I have no yard, so at the moment fresh air is limited. I work, cook, eat, and sleep within the same three rooms.
That's not even touching on people who paid out the ass to get studios in trendier neighborhoods. Personally, I'd lose my mind.
Contrast this with my parents in the suburbs. It's normally a longer commute, but there's a dedicated office, a back yard, and just generally more breathing room.
I think a lot of this is less WFH-related, and more, y'know, apocalypse-related. I could work from a coffee shop or coworking space. Go to the park. Go out for dinner/drinks in the evening. Hell, I could've gotten a bigger, cheaper place if commute time wasn't an issue.
But for the time being, the sprawl of suburban living seems to have its perks.
Also generally if you live in the suburbs you probably co-habit with your family and probably spend your commuting life wishing you could see more of them (this is orthogonal to the city / suburb question really - it has more to do with the older / younger split).
First Twitter was already moving towards permanent WFH before the pandemic, it only accelerated their plans. I highly doubt (m)any other companies were also seriously considering that move before the pandemic.
Second, working in a remote only team is very different from working in an office, or even from occasionally working from home. I have seen the best managers get completely clueless when managing full remote people.
Third you lose a lot of things by going full remote. You can no longer have hallway conversations, sharing new ideas over lunch, trying to pitch new ideas organically. You lose a lot of spontaneity by going full remote, which I fully expect to impact innovation potential. Some of the best ideas in my group are things that came up from organic conversations that we have been productizing.
Fourth has to do with company culture. I can't speak for every company, but I know that at my company there is a very clear favoring people local to where the HQ is located, probably at least in part for the reasons above. I don't see that changing easily. East coast to West coast in the same team means you have 3 hours a day where you can't have your whole team available at the same time.
What I expect to happen is most likely much greater flexibility for companies that were not open about it before, but full time remote for everyone seems like a huge stretch even over several years.
Is it, really? I always hear and read this, but I see very few anecdotes.
In thinking through my own interactions, I'm not sure anything that happened in the hallway, break room, or at lunch table actually contributed much more to the bottom line than conversations I've had over VC and Slack.
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A lot of people are probably more creative in a textual medium or even talking on the phone where they can't be overheard (I hate the feeling I might be distracting someone).
I wouldn't be surprised if the office squelches a lot of creativity. Of course, it all depends on the office environment and individuals.
At the start of all this I would have agreed but as the weeks go on my coworkers are just getting more and more introverted and you really have to push to get any sort of discussion about product and strategy, everything ends up into a meeting format you can't just do the sitting down, riffing and chatting which is where the actual creative work happens.
Might have a different perspective because I'm more on the design side than the engineering, but I'm very aware none of the most transformative moves in my company were all born out of discussions outside of work in more social settings between designers and engineers, I know some people don't like hearing that but that's the reality at my company at least.
As the saying goes, we spend our lives converting one proto into another.
I don't think this will happen because of people are worried about virus transmission, but instead because most people like working from home and we've proven we can be just as productive when we're out of the office.
That said, I'm one of the few people who like going into an office. There are fewer distractions and better food options. :)
If you don't have to go in everyday, the possible commuting distance increases massively. Before the virus, I worked from home and my commute was 160km twice per week by high speed train.
Take a map around the office where you work. Look at the kinds of home prices you can find an hour out. See how much closer you can be to nature or other particular amenities that matter to you. Would you like to have those with zero total change to your commute time?
Sounds pretty nice to me.
People like their socialization at work. Many also like living in the city anyway (granted, most of my colleagues are young and childless). And outside of extreme cases like SF, a tech salary is enough to rent a decent apartment.
I don't feel like the current scenario is indicative of a well structured WFH setup, even though we've been doing it for 2 months now.
In short I hope companies don't use this interlude to evaluate WFH productivity, because I think it isn't the best representative.
My day is basically split up into maybe 20m at a time where I can do something before being distracted.
I end up working during the night to catch up (just got done), but this is unsustainable long term.
The ability to hash things out verbally is a great escape hatch, but it has turned into a crutch. I hope universal WFH will push people to work to a standard where it can be the exception instead of the norm.
> Kids at home yelling at each other, other coworkers distracted
In my experience, working at home isn't much different from working at work. If you don't have a private office with a door, it's going to be very challenging to focus regardless of whether you're sharing space with your coworkers or your family. Long ago I worked in a cube farm that had the depressing gray regularity of a low-effort DOOM wod, and I'm not sure that wasn't better for productivity than the attractive, high-end open plan offices I've worked in since then.
In a couple of years, my wife and I will be living in a different house, and we will both have private offices, cost be damned. I've decided mine can be as small as 10'x6', as long as it has a door and a window.
We still manage to work with the same productivity in my company but we already had some experience with WFH.
I think it's very important to realize that if we are or are not productive WFH, there will be others who feel the opposite.
Working from home doesn't work for everyone, or it doesn't work in every case. Maybe it can be further optimized to work better for most cases, but currently it's not.
* Speaking as someone who recently started a new job two weeks before the government SIP for the Bay Area and has had to mostly virtual on-board and ramp-up. It has not been an easy experience. Maybe it's the on-boarding/ramp-up for my team that's not optimized, or maybe it's not easy simply because I'm not already a full-time remote worker already. Some people who enjoy WFH and get remote jobs probably don't have the issues I've had, and that's okay too. But I think it's unrealistic to expect everyone joining a new company during this situation to be properly productive through it and potentially WFH indefinitely. For my company in particular they've already mentioned we'll get to WFH for this through the end of the year.
Having a 1 day a week office would I think help people move away from high cost areas. If I only had to do it once a week a multi-hour or even flying to the office once a week wouldn't be bad (assuming that we return to our previous status quo with air travel.)
That said, I'm notably introverted and happy as a clam during quarantine, more or less, so I'm probably not representative of the country as a whole. Of people currently working remote, I think we'll see about 20% of people who won't want to go back into offices. For my own selfish purposes I'm really hoping for a paradigm shift towards more remote work, but I accept it doesn't work well for some people.
I don't think flying weekly to an office scales up as well as you think it might.
I sort of had this setup before covid: the company I work for does consulting and my coworkers and I will often be at client's offices. When we write our contracts we make sure to always designate Friday as the day where all employees come back to the 'home base' for meetings, catch-ups, socializing, etc. It works quite well, and we'd always look forward to Friday's because of it.
If I could continue to WFH 3-4 days a week and then go into the office on Thursday/Friday, that would be great.
This is the best of both worlds for a company.
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I think this is the right balance.
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What makes you think this is true and not just a post-hoc rationalization? Let me put it this way: offer that salary worldwide and you will still have difficulty finding top-tier talent, as many remote-first companies are finding out the hard way. Having been a hiring manager in such a position before, I will tell you that you are still competing against every other remote tech company to find and hire from the same global talent pool.
Secondly, you're not accounting for communication ease and timezone differences. A huge amount of the world is cut out if you optimize for remote candidates within +-1-3 TZs.
Finally, the assertion that the average valley firm doesn't need a $200k+ in 2020 USD terms engineer is also not necessarily true. Demand for senior talent is significantly higher than for mid range and junior talent, because mid-large size firms want it (to bolster their senior roster and make it easier for teams to subdivide), and small firms absolutely need it (they simply do not have a senior engineer and need at least one).
It’s only difficult to hire developers anywhere because you don’t want to pay what it would cost to get a yes.
There are other places in the US that are warm in the winter, of course, but less of them are also nice in the summer. Then among those, very few of them match the Bay Area in friendliness to things like LGBT causes.
I have a feeling that many people will continue gravitating to the Bay Area.
I wish more people would reject zip code COL so that companies starting to WFH don't just take Gitlabs idea of it.
Their calculations and reasoning are completely irrational. Rent is more a lot more in NYC, but utilities are the same; medical costs are the same; groceries are roughly the same (I found them cheaper in Manhattan than in nearby suburbs); you don't own a car (or two, as a couple); you don't have the expense of maintaining a large home and yard; etc. It costs a lot to live in NYC, but you can't compare the rent on a 1BR NYC apartment with a 1BR suburban apartment and say it's three times as expensive. It's a completely different lifestyle, and the choice for people like me is between a shoebox in the city with the perks of city life, or a comfortable 3BR home with a yard in the suburbs and a car and maybe a swimming pool or a boat or something. It's not a cheaper life, it's just a different life.
In the end, I think zipcode (and COL) is a weak proxy for talent. It's very easy to measure zipcode, compared to talent.
But, think about it from the other angle: if you have a history of this talent (earning high salaries in high-COL zip codes or otherwise), why on earth would you accept anything less than that, when moving to a lower COL area?
To me, it seems like a decision that would hurt the employer more than help them, since the people with proven talent would work for companies that don't discriminate on zip codes. And that costs more than the investment in assessing incoming talent levels.
Care to name some?
I'm not cranking out code that is somehow less effective while living in the NW England, and so to pay me less than someone else is downright insulting.
I also, to be clear, don't have any hard feelings about people who live in even cheaper[0] places than me, it's their choice. I used to work with a guy in the Phillipines who was on the same as me. Good for him!
[0] It's not that cheap in the NW England. It's clearly not SF, NY or London, but it's not cheap.
That is very short sighted. Your dollar value is highly dependent on where you live, that's just reality.
Anyone have thoughts about this?
It's interesting that folks envisioning a globally uniform payscale tend to posit SF salaries in Hanoi rather than Hanoi salaries in SF.
Or maybe practical beats ethical.
The minimum wage for a McDonalds cashier in NYC is $15/hour.
McDonalds also operates in India, and hires cashiers that do essentially the same work. If the employe was able to pay $15/hour for the same type of work in NYC, then shouldn't they pay the Indian cashier INR 1,125 / hour? Or what about the other way around, why shouldn't the NYC cashier get paid at the Indian cost-of-living?
And forget wages, how about the cost of goods and services? A 4BR house in Columbus, OH can cost about $300,000 — but the same house might cost about $3M in Palo Alto. Is this unfair / discriminatory? The house itself might be identical.
It's not just rent/mortgage price differences, there are also different laws regarding taxation, healthcare and retirement.
On the other hand you can't offer someone in the Bay Area a Eastern Europe level salary. Nobody would come, but you can offer a slightly higher than average salary in E.E. and they would definitely come. It's just that a global company needs to hire in both regions to be competitive.
Also, employers always pay employees less than the value of their work and pocket the rest. This is called profit.
I think your perception about salaries outside of the valley is skewed.
For example, are you equivalent to a L3 with 0 years of experience at google making 200K, or an L6 with 10 years experience making 600k?
We've all worked with highly qualified offshore resources (as well as many bad ones). Do they really deserve that 20k salary when we're making high six figures?
I've started hiring abroad. It's a different form of management, sure, but you absolutely beat the return on investment.
My advice is to try to stick with the same timezone, and the same language (or roughly anyway).
That is a pretty ridiculous assertion. Rent and taxes are higher but they are not $130k/year higher.
You can even save >$70k of the $200k you make in the bay area without being exceptionally frugal, which you obviously can't do if you're making $70k/year.
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In my own experience throughout my career I've been both severely overpaid and underpaid relative to my economic impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapiro%E2%80%93Stiglitz_theor...
I can certainly see companies wanting to pay less based on CoL simply to make the bottom line better. Given the way capitalism works, I'd say this is a near inevitability. The end result will probably be that the big tech companies are going to start "offshoring" work to the Midwest, and other low to very low cost of living areas. ("We'll pay you $70k per year, but you can live wherever you want in the US!")
I can't see this being good for employees, because there are significant benefits to living in a place like NYC or the Bay Area, and those benefits would be lost if people had to live in the middle of nowhere to make it worthwhile.
... that want to live in NYC or SF. For everyone else, who doesn't want to live in places like that, this is awesome. (And that's a word I never use)
The fundamental problem (for the cost-cutting employer) is that good engineering orgs really do generate that much value.
This happened with the wage-collusion attempts in the valley. Facebook was willing to give more raises than Google or Apple. In the latest roll of the dice, AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, and friensd were willing to pay more. It's the cycle of business.
I think a lot of people are going to be super surprised what a quiet room and your playlist of choice can do to increase productivity. Just my 2 cents.
Ironic thing is, she also works from home about 80-90% of the time. Guess she inhabits that mind-set more easily than I do!
That’s helped in most if not all cases.
It's the same for me – at home, and the opposite at the office. I live alone.
Outside of all that, it comes down to self-discipline.
A proper work environment is key, including limiting distractions and proper ergonomics. You also need co-habitants which respect and understand the boundaries and work rules. It really helps to have a house. I live in an apartment and can't control the distractions(literally as I hit 'reply' someone started a power saw in the garage below my office).